Associative Framing A uni¯ed method for measuring media frames and the media agenda Wouter van Atteveldt1, Nel Ruigrok2, and Jan Kleinnijenhuis1 1 Department of Communication Science, Free University Amsterdam,
[email protected],
[email protected] 2 Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam,
[email protected] Abstract. Communication Theory, such as Framing, is using increas- ingly sophisticated models for message content and transfer. To support this theoretical work it is needed to also devise more sophisticated meth- ods of content analysis, as the manual thematic content analysis often practised is too expensive and speci¯c to a single theory to provide for the large corpora needed to test sophisticated communication models. This paper proposes Associative Framing, a Relational Content Anal- ysis method based on the marginal and conditional reading chance of concepts. This provides a Communication Theoretic interpretation of linguistic co-occurrence analysis, and can help communication research by increasing the reach of automatic analyses and create more generic data sets, allowing for the simultaneous testing of di®erent theories. We illustrate this method with a case study on the associations of Islam and Terror in newspapers from three countries. Keywords: Content Analysis, Computer Content Analysis, Relational Content Analysis, Framing, Agenda Setting, Co-occurrence Introduction Theoretical progress in Communication Science depends largely on empirical evidence to test and sharpen theories. Such empirical evidence often consists wholly or partially of media content, making Content Analysis an important technique for progress in Communication Science. The last decades have seen a sharp increase in the number and complexity of communication theories, among which Framing takes a prominent place.