Stanford's Iyengar And Political Communications Lab Bring Experimental Framing Methods Online For Frameworks
Washington, DC, May 15 — Shanto Iyengar, a widely-recognized scholar of framing effects and head of Stanford University's Political Communications Lab, will collaborate with the FrameWorks Institute on a series of experimental surveys designed to test the impact of various frames on public opinion about early child development, community health and race. The addition of Iyengar to the FrameWorks research team is the latest in a series of refinements to the nonprofits' practice of Strategic Frame Analysis™, a multi-disciplinary multi-method approach to framing public issues more effectively to engage the public in solutions.
Iyengar is Professor of Political Science, and Harry & Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, as well as Director of the Political Communication Lab (PCL). The Lab develops and administers experimental studies of public opinion and political behavior through the use of both on-line and traditional methods. The lab uses the WWW as an experimental "site" which attracts online users as experimental participants. "The advantages of on-line experimentation are clear in light of the explosion in the number of households with access to the internet," explains Iyengar. "Moreover, available data suggest that internet users are more representative of the adult population than participants recruited at shopping malls, airports or other public facilities."
Iyengar has co-authored a number of studies with FrameWorks Fellow Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. including the framing of race and crime. Both Gilliam and Bales are contributors to "Do the Media Govern?: Politician, Voters, and Reporters in America, which Iyengar edited in 1997 with Richard Reeves (Sage Publications).
"From the beginning, Iyengar's work has been central to FrameWorks' thinking about framing research and practice," said FrameWorks President Susan Bales in announcing the collaboration. "We believe that his insights and his new methods will greatly enhance our thinking about the interplay of frames and public understanding of social issues."
PCL tests television, radio and print-based materials. Several of these manipulations are described in
Experimental Designs for Political Communication Research: From Shopping Malls to the Internet (see http://pcl.stanford.edu/). Dr. Iyengar's past studies have focused on national and local television news reports, and on campaign advertisements using participants recruited in public locations. The next generation of Iyengar's media research continues to explore these issues, but through web-based technology.
The PCL has a long-standing relationship with the on-line polling service Polimetrix (PMX) and will coordinate with PMX to draw samples for the FrameWorks experiments. The PMX sampling methodology works in two stages. First, a target sample is drawn using conventional random sampling. In the case of election surveys, for instance, the target population is derived from voter registration lists. Once the target sample is drawn, PMX identifies the closest "match" for each member of the sample from their opt-in Internet panel. This panel now consists of some two million Americans. The matching is carried out using a series of attributes including race, gender, age, region, education, and party affiliation.
"The matching procedure has been found to yield samples that are highly predictive," explains Frank Gilliam, who will serve as project manager on these studies for FrameWorks. "In the 2003 California special election, for example, the PMX matched sample correctly predicted the outcome of all seven propositions on the ballot with an average error rate of three percent. Only one other commercial polling firm matched this record of accuracy."
The FrameWorks Institute is a national nonprofit think tank devoted to framing public issues. Its work is based on Strategic Frame Analysis™, a multi-method, multi-disciplinary approach to empirical research. FrameWorks designs, commissions, publishes, explains and applies communications research to prepare nonprofit organizations to expand their constituency base, to build public will, and to further public understanding of specific social issues — the environment, government, race, children's issues and health care, among others. Its work is unique in its breadth — from qualitative, quantitative and experimental research to applied communications toolkits, advertising campaigns, regional and on-line workshops, and active list-serv discussion groups.
