Understanding Law and Legality in Media

当人们思考诸如结婚、报警或提起诉讼等法律的概念时，他们在形成自己的理解和判断时经常会考虑社区的价值观。个人了解其社区价值观的一种方式是通过专门的媒体。边缘化群体的成员尤其如此，他们往往被排除在主流对话之外或被边缘化。这项研究探讨了近五十年来为LGBTQ+社区服务的媒体对法律和法律的思想的报道和讨论的长期变化。这提供了一个机会，了解哪些法律的问题是最突出的LGBTQ+社区，并欣赏该社区对法律的行动和演员的态度。它通过研究更广泛的事件，如立法，司法裁决和社会运动活动如何影响特定问题的覆盖范围及其讨论的变化，作为LGBTQ+杂志中的法律问题。在这样做的过程中，该项目有助于深入了解法律的问题如何在边缘化群体的议程上出现和下降，边缘化社区的法律的意识如何随着时间的推移而发展，以及法律的决定如何影响公众对法律和法律的行为者的认识和态度。此外，通过雇用一个多样化的本科生和研究生研究助理团队，该项目将扩大代表性不足的群体在研究过程中的参与。 该项目代表了第一次对LGBTQ+媒体在很长一段时间内对法律和合法性的描述进行大规模审查。从理论上讲，研究人员将他们的方法植根于关于法律的意识、问题的突出性、关键时刻和司法影响的成熟文献中，同时对法律和合法性如何以及何时在受影响的社区中发挥作用提出了新的期望。在方法上，研究人员将联合收割机计算文本分析与严格的人类编码相结合，以调查1969-2015年美国LGBTQ+媒体中的权利主张和法院判决。首先，数据分析将确定和研究LGBTQ+社区中法律的问题的突出性如何随着时间的推移而变化，并评估影响这些变化的因素。其次，研究人员将研究LGBTQ+社区法律的意识的时间变化，并确定这些变化的原因。这些分析将使人们对文化、社会、政治和法律的因素如何影响边缘化社区中法律的概念的重要性以及该社区的法律的意识的特点有新的认识，包括对法律的和政治行为者的态度。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响进行评估来支持审查标准。

When individuals think about legal concepts like marrying, calling the police, or filing a lawsuit, they frequently consider their community’s values in formulating their understandings and judgments. One way that individuals get a sense of their community’s values is through specialized media. This is especially so among members of marginalized groups, who are often excluded from or sidelined in mainstream conversations. This study examines the long-term changes in the coverage and discussion of law and legal ideas in media serving the LGBTQ+ community over nearly five decades. This provides the opportunity to understand which legal issues are most salient to the LGBTQ+ community, and to appreciate that community’s attitudes towards legal actions and actors. It does this by examining how broader events, such as legislation, judicial rulings, and social movement activism influence changes in the coverage of particular issues and their discussion as matters of law in LGBTQ+ magazines. In doing so, the project contributes insights into how legal issues rise and fall on the agenda of marginalized groups, how the legal consciousness of marginalized communities develops over time, and how legal decisions influence public awareness and attitudes toward law and legal actors. Further, by employing a diverse team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants, this project will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the research process. This project represents the first-of-its-kind, large-scale examination of the portrayal of law and legality in LGBTQ+ media over an extended period of time. Theoretically, the researchers root their approach in the well-developed literatures on legal consciousness, issue salience, critical junctures, and judicial impact, while developing new expectations for how and when law and legality matter among affected communities. Methodologically, the researchers will combine computational text analysis with rigorous human coding to investigate depictions of rights claiming and court decisions in LGBTQ+ media in the United States from 1969-2015. The analysis of the data will, first, identify and examine how the salience of legal issues in the LGBTQ+ community changes over time, and evaluate what influences those changes. Second, the researchers will examine temporal shifts in the legal consciousness of the LGBTQ+ community, and identify the causes of those shifts. These analyses will shed new light on the ways in which cultural, social, political, and legal factors affect both the prominence of legal concepts in a marginalized community and the character of the legal consciousness of that community, including attitudes toward legal and political actors.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.