Framing youth issues for public support

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, NO. 112, WINTER 2006 © WILEY PERIODICALS, INC.Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/yd.190 11

Communicating effectively about the community’srole in promoting positive youth development iscritical to generating public support for qualityyouth programs.

1Framing youth issues for public support

Ann Lochner, Susan Nall Bales

research has confirmed short- and long-term positive effects ofquality youth development programs. Young people who partici-pate in structured developmental programs have better school at-tendance, better grades, more positive attitudes toward school, and higher aspirations for postsecondary education.1 Adults who asyoung people participate in activities outside of the regular schoolday are more likely to trust their parents, settle in stable relation-ships, be employed, report being happy with their lives, and beactive in their communities.2 Despite this evidence, policies sup-porting these programs are inadequate due in part to limited pub-lic understanding about the developmental process and the role ofquality youth development programs during the middle years. Thisconclusion prompted the Minnesota Commission on Out-of-School Time and its Minnesota collaborators to sponsor a Frame-Works Institute study of the attitudes of Minnesota citizens andparents toward youth and youth programs and how to effectivelyincrease their understanding about and support for positive youthdevelopment programs.

new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

12 RETHINKING PROGRAMS FOR YOUTH IN THE MIDDLE YEARS

This article highlights how a youth policy commission came toidentify the need for public will building as a priority in promot-ing positive youth policies. We review recommendations thatemerged from a research study exploring how the policy conversa-tion about youth and youth programs could be successfullyreframed. We also identify common dominant frames that nega-tively influence the way people think about youth issues and alter-nate frames that evoke a different way of thinking that is moresupportive of positive policy solutions. Implications of reframes foreffectively communicating about youth and intentional programsso vital to their optimal development are demonstrated.

Minnesota Commission on Out-of-School TimeThe Minnesota Commission on Out-of-School Time was convenedin December 2004 by University of Minnesota President RobertBruininks as part of his Presidential Initiative on Children, Youth, andFamilies. Commissioners were experts in the fields of child and ado-lescent development as well as representatives of business; phi-lanthropy; youth development programs; county, state, and tribal gov-ernments; and youth. The commission’s charge was to create a visionand strategies to ensure every Minnesota youth access to opportuni-ties supportive of his or her optimal development during nonschoolhours. The commission’s work was reinforced by research confirmingthe critical role of high-quality out-of-school opportunities in assur-ing that young people reach adulthood ready to assume roles asresponsible community members and leaders. Through a series ofwork groups, meetings, dialogues, and a youth caucus, this intergen-erational group identified a vision for out-of-school time in Minnesotathat includes key issues facing families, young people, programproviders, and policymakers as well as a series of recommendations.3

Throughout commission deliberations, communities wereviewed as the critical intersection where key developmental influ-ences converge during the middle years. Building on the founda-tion established by families during early childhood and extending

13FRAMING YOUTH ISSUES FOR PUBLIC SUPPORT


beyond the purview of academic learning, communities increas-ingly become the nexus of opportunities through which young peo-ple chart their course through childhood and adolescence. It wasacknowledged that considerable public support would be requiredfor communities to provide an adequate supply of quality programsreplete with relationships and experiences integral to the middleyears of development.

Commissioners recognized that despite the enormously high stakesfor the development of young people and the vitality of their commu-nities, access, availability, and quality of out-of-school opportunitiesacross Minnesota communities varied dramatically. Commissionersbegan to see connections between uneven quality among programs,program funding cuts, insufficient legislative attention, and a generalshortage of good information about youth development and theimportance of developmentally supportive programs. Increasingly,attention focused on the need to engage the public and policymakers inseeing the merit of positive developmental opportunities for all youngpeople. Commissioners called for a public will-building effort toengage the public at large and voting citizens in Minnesota commu-nities in understanding the added value of intentional community-based learning and development opportunities for young people.

Given the limited research on public attitudes about out-of-schooland after-school programs, learning more about how Minnesotansthink about the role of these programs in the development of youngpeople was deemed a critical first step in reaching out to the public.The FrameWorks Institute was engaged to design a research studythat would clarify dominant frames influencing public attitudesregarding youth, their development, their developmental needs, andthe policies and programs that would have an impact on their success.4

FrameWorks InstituteThe FrameWorks Institute works with nonprofit and philan-thropic organizations interested in stimulating a broader conver-sation about the causes and solutions associated with a variety of



social issues. The past decade of research in the social and cog-nitive sciences strongly suggests that the challenge of communi-cating about social issues requires an understanding of theconceptual frames that ordinary people bring to any given policydiscussion.

Using a multimethod, multidisciplinary approach to communi-cations research, called Strategic Frame Analysis, FrameWorks doc-uments dominant frames in public discourse, determines theirimpact on public opinion and policy preferences, and suggests howpublic thinking can be redirected (reframed) to support positivepolicy solutions more in keeping with the recommendations ofscholarly research and policy experts.

FramesFrom the perspective of Strategic Frame Analysis, public under-standing of an issue depends on its association with what WalterLippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” Put simply, peopleuse mental shortcuts to make sense of the world. These mentalshortcuts rely on “frames”: a small set of internalized concepts andvalues that allow us to accord meaning to unfolding events and newinformation. Put another way, frames are “organizing principles thatare socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolicallyto meaningfully structure the social world” (italics in the original).5

These frames can be triggered by various elements, such as lan-guage choices and different messengers or images. Each of thesecommunications elements, therefore, may have a profound influ-ence on decision outcomes.6 The result is that policy preferencesand attributions of responsibility vary dramatically depending onthe way an issue is framed or defined for the public. Framing guncontrol as an issue of individual autonomy, for example, leads tovery different conclusions from those evoked when the same issueis framed as a matter of public health. And the same individuals,exposed to these different frames, can alternate between oppos-ing views.



When it comes to public affairs, people get most informationfrom the news media, which over time sets up a framework ofexpectation about issues, or dominant frames. Habits of thoughtare developed that configure incoming information to conform toestablished frames, becoming mental shortcuts for processing newinformation. Understanding is thus frame-based rather than fact-based. Even when confronted with new facts about an issue, mostpeople will rely on the frame most familiar to them rather thancontest that frame by accepting the new facts as truth. This isimportant in a number of respects: first, it tends to preclude newunderstanding of an issue, but more subtly, these frames also estab-lish who is responsible for fixing any given social problem.

The social science literature of the past two decades has con-firmed that the perspective from which stories are told, or how theyare framed, is a powerful influence in assigning responsibility foran issue or problem. Understanding which frames advance whichpolicy options (solutions) is critical to effective communications.

Political psychologist Shanto Iyengar describes two types of framesthat are frequently used in the news media. Episodic frames (whichdominate U.S. television newscasts) depict public issues through thelens of concrete occurrences that happen in a specific time and place,such as crime reports. In most cases, the story is narrowly focused onthe individuals involved—the victim or the perpetrator—and resem-bles a case study. The individual is assigned responsibility. By contrast,thematic frames place public issues in a broader context, identify-ing the circumstances in the community or systems that contributedto the problem. Using the crime report example, a thematic framewould describe the conditions in the community or shortcomings ofcurrent policies as well as related trends, a distinctly different storyfrom the episodic focus on life stories or salient characteristics of per-petrator and victim. Experimental research demonstrates that the-matic frames more effectively engage the public in policy solutions.7

Thus, Strategic Frame Analysis focuses on broad societal condi-tions and systems responsible for social issues, recognizing thatsocial issues require admission of a problem to the public arena forit to be prioritized for policy solutions—a long-term process. This



approach distinguishes Strategic Frame Analysis from more typi-cal marketing, public service advertising, persuasion, and publicrelations campaigns that target individual behavior and use crypticmessages in communication with consumers over a shorter timespan, with the goal of stimulating individual actions or behaviors.And in seeking to align expert and lay understanding of an issue,Strategic Frame Analysis takes on the complex job of translatingthe thematic understanding of social issues into simpler terms with-out losing the important frame elements of context and attributionof responsibility.

Focus of Minnesota researchThe Minnesota research built on a broader research base estab-lished through a more extensive national study of public attitudesabout adolescent development conducted for the W. T. GrantFoundation from 1999 to 2001.8 FrameWorks tested those earlierfindings with the Minnesota public and posed additional questionsto probe possible approaches for reframing the role of communityin advancing youth development in the state. Among the earlierfindings (for W. T. Grant cited above) was one that proved of spe-cial interest in Minnesota: the predominantly negative perceptionof youth held by many Americans. The conclusions from this ear-lier study portray mixed attitudes about young people influencedin large part by the media. Today, youth are viewed as being fun-damentally different from youth in the past, and the difference isattributed by adults to declining values. Parents are seen as the cul-prits for this negative trend and are held primarily, if not exclu-sively, responsible for the well-being of their own children andyouth. Good parenting is defined narrowly as protection fromphysical harm and the negative influences of peers and community.Perhaps most notable is the belief that youth are fully formedrather than progressing through a predictable stage in humandevelopment during which behavior and decision making are pro-foundly affected by documented changes in brain architecture.



Methods for understanding and testing public frames about youthThe first step in any effort to engage the public in a political orsocial issue requires a descriptive analysis of the information peo-ple have available to them. Given most people’s relative unfamil-iarity with most social and political issues, this requires anunderstanding of the way an issue has been portrayed in the news,our culture’s primary political storyteller. Secondarily, analystsattempt to discern, using qualitative research methods, the degreeto which these news frames have been internalized by citizens andthe extent that they can remember and reason based on the storiestaught to them by the media. In the case of youth development,where some familiarity with the issue is presumed, communicationsscholars attempt to identify missing pieces of information that pre-vent ordinary people from learning new ways to think about anissue. This is especially pertinent for issues about which the publicis asked to understand complicated scientific phenomena and toreach policy judgments based on that understanding—whether thisrelates to global warming, ozone depletion, or human development.

Building on FrameWorks’s earlier work on youth development,as well as extensive work on early child development,9 a series ofhypotheses or testable propositions was developed to guide thework in Minnesota. These included the following:

• The dominance of parental responsibility is likely to undermineinitial support for public investments in youth programs.

• The absence of an identifiable social good to which after-schoolprograms are a means will reinforce the identity of the issue asprivate for most people.

• Positive community actors and influences will require conscien-tious reinforcement if they are to establish community as a locusfor positive effects on the lives of youth.

• Framing after-school programs narrowly as crime prevention isunlikely to result in greater support for quality developmentalprograms.



• The absence of a concrete metaphor—or simplifyingmodel10—will prove a stumbling block in teaching the publicnew information.

To test these propositions, and to determine whether they couldbe overcome using speculative reframes, FrameWorks’s Minnesotaresearch was structured as a two-tiered information-gatheringapproach involving focus groups and cognitive elicitations in localcommunities.

Focus groups

Eight geographically representative focus groups were conductedin Minnesota, in addition to two groups dedicated exclusively tominority representation. Focus group members were chosen ran-domly to include “engaged citizens,” or individuals who are likelyto be voters and community contributors. A series of hypotheticalnews articles modeled after actual news reports was used as thestimulus for a series of discussions about youth and youth pro-grams. Focus groups were designed to explore the following:

• How Minnesotans think in general about youth, their develop-mental needs, and types of policies and programs that affect them.

• What frames are most frequently used by adults when thinkingabout youth and the impact of these dominant frames on adults’consideration of policy proposals such as using public funds toexpand after-school programs.

• Which alternative frames would prove effective in evoking a dif-ferent way of thinking, one that is more supportive of positivepolicy solutions.

Cognitive elicitations

To validate and extend the focus group findings, one-on-one unstruc-tured interviews were also conducted with twenty average Minnesotacitizens and analyzed by a team of linguists and anthropologists asso-ciated with the FrameWorks Institute. These research subjects wererecruited through an ethnographic networking process.



Findings on public attitudes

Minnesota research findings confirm the earlier youth developmentresearch conducted for W. T. Grant. As hypothesized, the public’sdominant frame was one of personal and parental responsibility foryouth that prevented people from according a public role for posi-tive youth development in the form of after-school programs. Whenframes emphasizing the importance of protecting youth from crimewere tested, adults were indeed willing to support after-school pro-grams but not the quality developmental programs that research hasdemonstrated and social policy experts believe make a difference.Although there was limited awareness about the influence of com-munity actors as influences on young people, Minnesotans remem-bered and reaffirmed the role of mentors when reminded of theseactors in ways that did not displace the role of parents.

The Minnesota research also revealed three critical frame ele-ments that can greatly aid in public reappraisals of youth programs:brain development in youth, the role of youth in community devel-opment, and the role of community in youth development. First,it is important to explain youth in developmental terms with anemphasis on the active phase of brain development activated byparticular features of programs in which they are engaged. Second,people need to understand the critical link between positive youthdevelopment and the community, state, and nation’s future viability.Minnesotans are likely to rethink their reaction to youth programsif these are understood in the context of community development.It is important to emphasize that high-quality youth programs pro-vide the pathway through which communities are transformed, asare actively engaged young people. Investment in youth is invest-ment in the vitality of communities. This kind of statement is likelyto help Minnesotans see the end goal to which youth developmentis a necessary means. Third, it is in community settings that devel-opmental opportunities take place. The use of strong, concretedevelopmental metaphors, like the stages of brain architecture thataccompany development, helps people understand that young peo-ple are experiencing a predictable biological stage of growth and



change that is interconnected with the environment of develop-mental opportunities available in their communities. This is dra-matically different from their perceived identity, as documented inthe previous FrameWorks’s research: youth as “the other.” In sum,a substantially different conversation can be had with Minnesotansabout the importance of youth development if this topic is framedin terms of community and development, not risks, crime, andparental responsibility.

Youth messages reframedAs was illustrated in FrameWorks’s research findings, engaging pub-lic support for positive youth development programs requiresunderstanding of the developmental process, the role of intentionalopportunities as essential developmental tools, and the role of com-munities as both the locus of intentional experiences and the ulti-mate destination for the developmental journey. FrameWorks’sframing advice is instructive in guiding the creation of a more com-pelling story to engage the public in supporting positive policy solu-tions for young people:

• The solution is placed up front to indicate what readers shouldunderstand as the central need, reasons they should be con-cerned, and the change needed.

• The relationship between the role of parents, youth programs,and communities is made explicit by framing them as intercon-nected and interdependent.

• The developmental benefits of youth programs and how theysupport young people’s developmental needs is made explicit byemploying brain architecture as a simplifying model. This anal-ogy describes the developmental construction work in whichyoungsters are engaged and portrays development during themiddle years into adulthood as a biological phase through whichall young people must navigate.



• Community is positioned as the place young people naturallynavigate as their maturation process progresses and is the locusof developmental activities.

• The value of developmental opportunities is elevated when cor-related with practicing roles they will later play as adults as inte-grated community members and contributors.

The Minnesota message is reframed as follows: The importanceof providing essential experiences during out-of-school hours can-not be overstated in light of recent brain research about the criti-cal role they play in the development of young people:

• Through experience, practice, and experimentation with rolesthey will later play as adults—such as teamwork, decision mak-ing, leadership, and community contribution—young peopleensure the developmental connections needed to establish thatthese competencies are completed.

• This real-life skill building happens in communities in structuredprograms like 4-H or CampFire or activities in the wider com-munity where parents and other adults serve as communityguides for the developmental journey of young people.

• As children and youth engage in high-quality developmentalexperiences over time, they practice the skills they will need tobecome responsible adults and enhance the vitality of their com-munities in the process: a win-win situation.

Lessons learned: Perspectives about framing youth issuesAdvocates for intentional youth programs and those who documenttheir benefits have long wondered about the shallowness of publicsupport. Whereas people say they would support youth programs,that consensus dissolves in the face of argument for reasons thatthe FrameWorks’s research reveals.



As illustrated in FrameWorks’s research findings, generatingwide public support for positive youth development programsrequires grounding the issue in an understanding of the develop-mental process of adolescence, explaining the role of intentionalopportunities as essential tools for growth and development, andpositioning communities as both the locus of intentional experi-ences and the ultimate destination for the developmental journey.

Clearly, this research argues, positive youth programs must beframed in terms of the larger societal benefits that accrue fromyouth engagement in these programs. In addition, by helping Min-nesotans understand how development works and how youth programs of various quality support or impede adolescent devel-opment, policy advocates can engage in the important work of public education.

Notes1. Huang, D., Gribbons, B., Kim, K. S., Lee, C., & Baker, E. L. (2000). A

decade of results: The impact of the LA’s BEST afterschool enrichment initiative onsubsequent student achievement and performance. Los Angeles: University of Cal-ifornia at Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Stud-ies, Center for the Study of Evaluation; Hamilton, L. S., & Klein, S. P. (1998).Achievement test score gains among participants in the foundation’s school-age enrich-ment program. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.

2. Gambone, M. A., Klem, A. M., & Connell, J. P. (2002). Finding out whatmatters for youth: Testing key links in a community action framework for youth devel-opment. Philadelphia: Youth Development Strategies and the Institute forResearch and Reform in Education; Connell, J. P., Gambone, M. A., & Smith,T. J. (2000). Youth development in community settings: Challenges to ourfield and our approach. In Youth development issues, challenges, and directions (pp.281–299). Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures.

3. Minnesota Commission on Out-of-School Time. (2005). Journeys intocommunity: Transforming youth opportunities for learning and development. Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota. http://www.mncost.org

4. Bales, S. N. (2005). Making the case for youth programs: The Minnesotaresearch. A FrameWorks Message Memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorksInstitute; Bales, S. N. (2005). Minnesotans talk about youth issues. Washington,DC: FrameWorks Institute.

5. Reese, S. D., Grandy, O. H., Jr., & Grant, A. E. (2001). Framing public life:Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

6. Iyengar, S. (1987). News that matters: Television and American opinion.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



7. Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

8. Bales, S. N. (2001). Reframing youth issues for public consideration and sup-port. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute.

9. Bales, S. N. (2005). Talking early child development and exploring the con-sequences of frame choices. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute.

10. Aubrun, A, Grady, J., & Bales, S. N. Topic: Opening up the black box: A casestudy in simplifying models. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute.

ann lochner provides leadership for the Applied Research Collaborativeon Youth Development at the University of Minnesota Center for 4-Hand Community Youth Development. She previously served as director ofthe Minnesota Commission on Out-of-School Time.

susan nall bales is the president and founder of the nonprofit Frame-Works Institute. She is a contributing member of the National ScientificCouncil on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Documents

Framing youth issues for public support