Child and Family Mental Health
In 2008, FrameWorks began a multi-year study of American thinking about child and family mental health. Building on a decade of research on public perceptions of children’s issues, this research was designed to compare expert understanding with public patterns of thinking and to use framing research to close the conceptual gap. The full research design includes both qualitative and quantitative methods, documenting the dominant frames used to explain these issues in media and in expert discourse, as well as providing extensive documentation of how the public hears these communiques. The reports that follow document an evolving “core story” of child and family mental health, using framing techniques to plug the cognitive holes in lay understanding of this critical issue.
Our Funders
Support for FrameWorks' research and message development on child and family mental health was provided by the Endowment for Health (NH) and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
Our Research
Children’s Mental Health: A Review of the Scientific Discourse (2009) –This report offers an extensive literature review as well as expert interviews to begin to document the story that experts wish to tell about child and family mental health.
Conflicting Models of Mind in Mind: Mapping the Gaps Between the Expert and the Public Understanding of Child Mental Health as Part of Strategic Frame Analysis (2009) This report examines the differences between the ways that members of the scientific community and the general public think about concepts of mental health, and mental illness in relation to young children. Dominant cultural models for children's mental health are identified and suggestions for further research are provided.
Competing Frames of Mental Health and Mental Illness: Media Frames and the Public Understandings of Child Mental Health (2009) examines 80 news articles focused on child mental health drawn from large and regional newspapers May 2008 – May 2009. News coverage is analyzed from both a descriptive perspective and a cognitive perspective, suggesting how media frames interact with the cultural models of child mental health documented in other research.
Advancing Support for Child Mental Health Policies: Early Results from Experimental Research (2009) reports on the effects of various frame elements (values, child development principles and simplifying models) on child mental health policy preferences.
