Too Hard to Shout Over the Loudest Frame: Effects of Competing Frames in the Context of the Crystallized Media Coverage on Offshore Outsourcing

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshore outsourcing, an issue that is characterized by a predominantly negative, unemployment-focused media framing. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N = 152) demonstrate that conventional framing effects do hold for this issue and for this media context by moving recipients’ attitudes in the direction consistent with the valence of the frame. However, they also show the backfire effect of the positively valenced frame among recipients with greater interest in political and economic news, who become less supportive of outsourcing if they read a story framing outsourcing from a consumer-oriented perspective. Our results contribute to the ongoing debate about the limits of framing effects on forming opinion about contentious policy issues and demonstrate the challenges for nondominant perspectives to make their way to news-savvy audiences even when the nature of the issue in question necessitates considering them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Following previous research (Mansfield & Mutz, 2013), we hereafter refer to offshore outsourcing for the sake of brevity as simply outsourcing while acknowledging the differences between the two. Outsourcing refers to the movement of a company’s business operations to an outside vendor. Offshore outsourcing refers to a specific case of outsourcing when business operations move both outside the company and abroad.

² A related study by Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007) enriches this definition with another dimension of applicability, “the [perceived] fit between the constructs a frame suggests should be applied to an issue” (p. 16). For example, a news message framed in a way that connects tax policy and unemployment would be considered applicable if, after the exposure to the message, the audience accepts that these concepts are, indeed, connected (p. 15).

³ Cognitive response research posits that the time spent with a message is spent not only on processing the message itself but also on generating audience’s own thoughts in response (Petty & Cacioppo, 1996, p. 225), suggesting that the more time one gets to spend with the message, the more topic-related thoughts one will generate.

⁴ In looking at the participants’ responses through the lens of both evoked issue attributes and the degree of elaboration, we follow the conceptual lead of previous research (e.g., de Vreese, 2004; Price et al., 1997; Shah et al., 2004). Despite differences in measurement, these studies have viewed issue interpretation and degree of elaboration as vital to providing insight into the complexity of the respondents’ mental models activated by news frames.

⁵ Conceptually speaking, a “contrast effect” constitutes an instance of a broader category of backfire effects (Chong & Druckman, 2007a, p. 641; see also Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). Other examples include a “boomerang effect” in science communication, “occur[ing] when a message is strategically constructed with a specific intent but produced a result that is the opposite of that intent” (Hart & Nisbet, 2012, p. 704); “belief polarization,” when “presentation of the same information elicits further attitudinal divergence between people with opposing views” (Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook, 2012, p. 119); or the effect of reinforcing misperceptions in response to corrective information (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). As suggested by these conceptualizations and the methodological design of previous research, the backfire effect can be tested, similarly to our study, in the absence of the experimental juxtaposition of oppositely oriented pieces of information, in the presence of just one message, and is considered to have occurred if exposure to the message results in moving the responder’s attitude in the message-incongruent direction.

⁶ The attention check questions asked participants to identify the race of the exemplar in the story and to indicate if the exemplar benefitted from outsourcing. The rate of inattentive respondents was 38.7%. Despite being comparable with the rate reported in some previous research (Goodman, Cryder, & Cheema, 2013; Oppenheimer, Meyvis, & Davidenko, 2009), it still raised a possibility that the failure rate might have been due not to the participant’s inattention, but to ineffective manipulation of the treatment. However, a pretest of stories with 13 participants confirmed that the two frames produced significantly different perceptions of whether the exemplar was portrayed as benefitting from outsourcing, F(1, 11) = 21.32, p < .001, partial η² = .66. This suggests that the failure of some participants to attend to the treatment in the expected way could be explained by their not paying sufficiently close attention to the story, rather than an unsuccessful treatment manipulation.

⁷ For the sake of brevity, we hereafter refer to the consumer frame as a “positive” frame and to the unemployment frame as a “negative” frame. In doing so, we rely on our earlier discussion of issue frames as being inherently valenced while recognizing that differences between the two frames cannot be effectively reduced to mere changes in valence.