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

本研究探讨了个人和社区为理解重大时事而发展的框架过程、概念和逻辑结构在网络媒体中的作用。它侧重于2019冠状病毒病大流行，这是一场全球卫生危机，其独特之处不仅在于其前所未有的规模和严重性，还在于人们传播疫情的媒体环境。政府组织、新闻服务、在线团体、当地社区和个人都在寻求理解、定位和定位自己与实时展开的事件的关系时相互作用。这些不同的参与者不断地在多个交流平台上构建和重新构建事件，以加强、破坏、颠覆、断裂甚至完全取代彼此的方式。重要的是，不仅要了解这些过程本身的动态，还要了解它们与个人、社区和社会信仰和行为的关系。处理全球卫生事件需要了解个人和社区如何解释这些事件。这项工作将有助于传播和媒体研究、计算语言学和社会计算。研究结果还将为教育模块的开发提供信息，这些模块旨在丰富学生对技术在调解我们对重大时事的理解方面可以发挥的作用的理解。为了分析框架作为一个发生在不同媒介生态中的过程，该项目在四个相互关联的阶段中协同结合了来自不同学科的观点和方法。第一阶段将应用媒体研究、卫生人文和科学技术研究的定性方法，分析大流行的主要框架，以及人们如何理解他们对这些框架的反应和参与。第二阶段将把第一阶段的方法和发现与计算技术进行对话，既告知这些技术的实现细节，又为进一步的定性分析提供文本焦点。第三阶段将从第一阶段和第二阶段中得出关于框架过程如何与人们的信念和行为相互作用的可测试的假设，并将开发创新的方法，可以在现实世界中实验地测试这些假设。在第4阶段，与不同利益攸关方的条件反射性接触将丰富研究人员和利益攸关方对他们在多样化媒体生态中构建大流行的作用的理解。对所有阶段的分析将产生一些发现，这些发现将推动对个人、社区和社会如何在异质的、有时不稳定的网络媒体环境中进行交流的研究，从而形成对当前重大事件的信念和行为的指导理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.