A complementary approach to Critical Frame Analysis and ‘what is the policy represented to Be?’

ABSTRACT

Critical Frame Analysis (CFA) is a method for analyzing policy framing by excavating rhetorical meaning. In contrast, ‘What is the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) is a method for critiquing common assumptions underpinning public policy by questioning unexamined knowledges. CFA is constructivist WPR is constructionist. Can two policy methods from different research paradigms be used in tandem? Scholars do not agree if this is possible; those who do say little about why and how to do it. I argue that although CFA and WPR have distinct metatheoretical foundations, process-oriented researchers doing single case and small n studies can use both in tandem to produce more rigorous, critical scholarship. I explain why using them in a complementary fashion is not only possible but also desirable and illustrate how to do it by drawing on examples from three dissimilar policy debates about controversial gender practices like veiling.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture and women’s rights
• methods
• critical frame analysis
• “what is the policy represented to Be?”
• public policy
• comparative analysis

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Hanne Marlene Dahl, Sam Koreman, Elisabeth Olivius, Allison Pugh, Jennifer Rubenstein, the anonymous reviewers and journal editors, and to panel participants at the ‘New Directions in Feminist Theories and Methods’, American Political Science Association 2022 and at the ‘Analysing Power and Agency’, European Conference on Politics and Gender 2022 for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2024.2383194

Notes

1. The phrase ‘clash between culture and women’s rights’ refers to the conventional wisdom. My research is about cultural rights as defined in human rights documents: an individual’s right to culture, a group’s right to its culture, and a group’s right to self-determination.

2. I do not use the phrase ‘Third World women’ but ‘minoritized women’ to displace this effect. I include ‘women’ in these scare quotes to indicate that this category is productive, meaning women do not exist in nature but are made.

3. Minoritized refers to the process by which a group is systematically marginalized, disadvantaged, and oppressed based on social, cultural, economic, and/or political factors. Justice as defined by minoritized women means an end to racism, sexism, and their compounding interactions.

4. Claiming the two might inform one another is not novel (Kantola 2006; O’Brien 2018). Detailing how and why they are compatible is. Critical refers to questioning conventional practices rooted in unexamined ways of thinking (Bacchi 2009, xv).

5. Trustworthiness refers to interpretive evaluative criteria: thick description, reflexivity, and intertextuality (Bacchi 2009, xii; Schwartz-Shea 2015, 131).

6. Following CFA, a policy frame ‘transforms fragmentary or incidental information into a structured and meaningful problem, in which a solution is implicitly or explicitly enclosed’ (Verloo 2005, 20, italics in original).

7. Open coding is central to CFA. For example, scholars do not define contested concepts such as culture a priori but code for their meaning(s).

8. According to Dombos et al. (2012, 6–7) policy texts identify a problem and explain why it exists (are problem oriented and causalistic), detail what must be done to remedy the problem (are practical, delegative, targeted, specific, and contain a budget), and strive to make a convincing case for the solution offered (create authority and seek logical consistency and comprehensiveness).

9. All quotations are from the CFA template (Appendix B).

10. All generalizations about the status of CFA and WPR scholarship draws on research conducted by Sam Koreman (Appendix A).

11. (Bacchi 2017), 21.

12. When used reflexively, political ontology requires ‘researchers to reflect actively on the political implications’ of our methods as a political practice (Bacchi 2012, 149).

13. The text must be ‘prescriptive … a form of a proposal and a guide to conduct’ (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 18, italics in original).

14. Jones and Raedelli follow Jupille (2005), assessing five metatheoretical facets, including social theories that explain human action. Here, these theories are constructivist (doing what is socially appropriate) and constructionist (doing something because of who we think we are). I do not discuss the fifth metatheoretical facet, disciplines, as feminist public policy scholars developed CFA and WPR.

15. The quote within the quote belongs to Dean (1999, 32).

16. According to constructionists, it is not simply that we are raised to perform a particular gender script. Instead, we are born into a world of unquestioned gender knowledges that obscure the reality that women and men are made, not born (Butler 1990). To assume otherwise is a reification.

17. The practice has gained acceptance and is commonly presented as an iconic African tradition. For example, see the television program ‘Uthando Nes’thembu’ (Love and Polygyny).

18. As this overview suggests, WPR and CFA need not be done in a specific order. Instead, this process should flow.

19. Some CFA prompts require coding words and phrases literally in the text. Other prompts require interpretation, meaning reflections on codes and memoing. The codes are the evidence, the interpretation is the analysis.

20. This does not imply a hierarchy of methods or mechanistic application. Researchers should engage in an iterative process as prompted by memoing.

21. See Appendix G for the texts coded for all three policy debates. All documents are from the relevant time, address the policy issue, had political significance, and were written by relevant individuals, institutional authorities, or their representatives. Although document types varied within and across the three policy debates, I was able to apply CFA and WPR to them all. This was most challenging within each policy debate. Government texts were detailed and lengthy, texts by minoritized women and their allies much less so. This variety contributed to intertextuality.

22. Not all minoritized women agreed. I refer to texts by minoritized women who participated in these controversies and who were autonomous from the state and group leaders.

23. Intersectionality refers to how interlocking structures of oppression put people into unequal relations of power. Human rights organizations used it to refer to multiple forms of discrimination.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, and the University of Virginia. IRB Information: # 2011019000, University of Virginia.

Notes on contributors

Denise M. Walsh

Denise Walsh is an Associate Professor in the Departments of at the University of Virginia. Her research investigates how liberal democracies can become more just. Walsh’s current book project, Imperial Sexism: Why Culture and Women’s Rights Don’t Clash, compares the French ‘burka ban’, polygyny in South Africa, and the marrying out rule for Indigenous women in Canada. Her first book, Women’s Rights in Democratizing States, compares women’s political participation in South Africa, Poland, and Chile to argue that as public debate becomes more open and inclusive women’s rights advance. Walsh’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation; USAID; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies; the Institute for Women’s Studies, University of Michigan; the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy; the Dickey Center for International Understanding, Dartmouth College; and many organizations at the University of Virginia.