Innovating Qualitative Framing Analysis for Purposes of Media Analysis Within Public Health Inquiry

TLDR

Public health media analysis is criticized for lacking methodological diversity, and while the framing paradigm offers valuable insights, its concepts remain elusive and difficult to measure. The article aims to foster creative thinking in public health media analysis and to demystify framing analysis by illustrating a qualitative framing technique and providing a practical guide. The authors present a step‑by‑step guide for a qualitative framing analysis method, applying it to data and contrasting its results with those from thematic analysis. The method’s results differ from thematic analysis and highlight benefits for public health scholarship.

Abstract

Public health is said to lack methodological diversity and creativity in media analysis. Although the framing paradigm offers important conceptual and operational insights for undertaking media analysis in public health research, frames are described as “elusive” to measure with their analysis a “methodological black box.” With this article, we aim to foster creative thinking around media analysis in public health and to make the “black box” of framing analysis more transparent, by illustrating the innovation and application of a qualitative framing analysis technique in original public health research. We provide a “how to” guide for this framing analysis method and use data to illustrate methodological challenges encountered during the research. The findings drawn from this method are contrasted with findings gained from thematic analysis applied to the same data. The article concludes by considering the benefits of this type of framing analysis within public health scholarship.