Race
Beginning in winter 2003, the FrameWorks Institute began an intensive project devoted to understanding how Americans think and talk about the issue of race. This research was supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the Charles S. Mott Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The objectives of the project were:
- To understand the way ordinary Americans, both whites and people of color, think about the issue of race and its relationship to such issues as health, education, community and crime, with special emphasis on disparities in those systems
- To experiment with new ways of talking about race in America that elevate concern for equity and allow people to engage with potential solutions for achieving it across these systems, and
- To translate this research into lessons for the broader field of civil rights scholars and advocates
This project embodies a full range of the research tools used to identify dominant frames and to test the effects of potential reframes, from elicitations and media content analyses to focus groups and survey research. For a synthesis and analysis of the findings to date, click here. For access to all research reports, click here. Further research and a communications kit of applications are forthcoming.
Our Research
An analysis of the project findings, are available in a MessageBrief that summarizes and interprets findings.
FrameWorks updates its analysis of research on how Americans think about race, in this fundamentally new MessageMemo from Frank Gilliam.
The conceptual base of the project:
A Concept Memo was developed at the outset of the project, expressly aimed at capturing our thinking as we entered the research phase of the project. This memo lays out a series of 8 hypotheses and presents a model for understanding how racial differences in life chances are explained by public perceptions of the adherence or deviation by racial and ethnic groups from American values. This important memo serves as the anchor for the project and it is against this model that our early research findings are checked. Click here for a related diagram.
A Policy Inquiry was undertaken to enlist input from important groups working on race-related issues. At the same time, we asked Dr. Kenny J. Whitby of the University of South Carolina to integrate these responses into a broader policy framework responsive to our core issues. The resulting report, "Outlining a Race Policy Agenda for America," June 2004, has served to anchor the policy discussions that are central to the focus group research.
Race Research
- A Content Analysis of major media was initiated to over May and June 2004, covering such important news events as the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and Cover the Uninsured Week. Commissioned from the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the report covers 14 news outlets over 7 weeks, yielding 547 news stories and opinion articles. It largely confirms the hypotheses posed in the Concept Memo, further linking Americans' perceptions of how race works in this country to habits of perception driven by persistent narratives.
- A Cognitive Media Analysis of both prototypical and aberrant news coverage was developed to deepen our appreciation for exactly how the dominant scripts affect thinking about race, and whether any of the alternative coverage yields different patterns of thinking. This report is based on a selective referral of news stories from the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
- Cognitive Elicitations Interviews, or one-on-one open-ended interviews, with 50 individuals in 7 states helped the research group team identify the most common and corrosive frames in play with respect to race and racism. The insights from this work grounded future iterations of the research in a small number of core issues which we were able to watch play out in the focus groups, furthering our understanding of the impact of these frames on public discourse.
- Focus Groups were conducted to assess how Americans think and talk about race in a setting of their peers. Fourteen focus groups were conducted in the late fall and early winter of 2004 with engaged citizens across the country (i.e., people who say they are registered to vote, read the newspaper frequently, are involved in community organizations, and have recently contacted a public official or spoken out on behalf of an issue.) Focus groups were divided by race and class, and followed an iterative process, discarding unproductive frames and introducing new frames as the process evolved.
- An Experimental Survey was conducted to test the effects of several reframes on racial attitudes and policies. Particular attention was paid to distinctions between explicit and implicit racial cues. The sample is national, with a California oversample.
