HCC Core: Medium: Making Meaning out of Crisis: Mixed-Methods Investigation into the Nature and Impact of Framing Processes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This research investigates the role in online media of framing processes, the concepts and logical structures that individuals and communities develop to understand major current events. It focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic, a global health crisis that has been unique not only for its unprecedented magnitude and severity, but also for the media environment in which people communicated about it. Government organizations, news services, online groups, local communities, and individual persons all interact as they seek to understand, orient toward, and situate themselves in relation to events unfolding in real time. These diverse participants continually frame and reframe events across multiple communication platforms in ways that reinforce, undermine, subvert, fracture, or even entirely replace one another. It is important to understand not only the dynamics of these processes themselves but also how they relate with individual, community, and societal beliefs and behaviors. Addressing global health events requires understanding how individuals and communities interpret those events. The work will contribute to communication and media studies, computational linguistics, and social computing. The research findings will also inform the development of educational modules designed to enrich students' understanding of the role that technology can play in mediating our understanding of major current events. To analyze framing as a process that occurs within a diverse media ecology, this project synergistically combines perspectives and methods from varied disciplines across four interconnected phases. Phase 1 will apply qualitative methods from media studies, health humanities, and science and technology studies to analyze dominant framings of the pandemic, as well as how people understand their responses to and participation in those framings. Phase 2 will place the methods and findings from Phase 1 in dialog with computational techniques, both informing the implementation details of those techniques and offering textual foci for further qualitative analysis. Phase 3 will derive testable hypotheses from Phase 1 and Phase 2 about how framing processes interact with people's beliefs and behaviors, and it will develop innovative methods that can experimentally test those hypotheses in real world settings. In Phase 4, reflexive engagement with diverse stakeholders will enrich both researchers' and stakeholders' understandings of their role in framing the pandemic within a diverse media ecology. Analyses across all phases will generate findings that advance research on how individuals, communities, and societies communicate within heterogeneous, sometimes volatile networked media environments to form understandings that guide both beliefs and behavior about major current events. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.