Understanding Law and Legality in Media

当个人考虑结婚、报警或提起诉讼等法律概念时，他们经常会考虑社区的价值观，以形成他们的理解和判断。个人了解社区价值观的一种方式是通过专业媒体。这在边缘化群体中尤其如此，他们经常被排除在主流对话之外或被排挤在一边。这项研究考察了近50年来媒体在服务LGBTQ+社区时对法律和法律思想的报道和讨论的长期变化。这提供了机会来了解LGBTQ+社区最突出的法律问题，并了解该社区对法律行动和行为者的态度。它通过考察更广泛的事件，如立法、司法裁决和社会运动激进主义，如何影响LGBTQ+杂志对特定问题的报道及其作为法律问题的讨论的变化。通过这样做，该项目有助于深入了解法律问题如何在边缘化群体的议程上起起伏伏，被边缘化社区的法律意识如何随着时间的推移而发展，以及法律决定如何影响公众对法律和法律行为者的认识和态度。此外，通过雇用不同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群体在研究过程中的参与。这个项目是对LGBTQ+媒体在较长一段时间内对法律和合法性的描绘进行的第一次大规模审查。理论上，研究人员将他们的方法植根于关于法律意识、问题突出度、关键时刻和司法影响的成熟文献，同时对法律和合法性在受影响社区中如何以及何时发挥重要作用产生新的预期。在方法上，研究人员将把计算文本分析与严格的人类编码结合起来，调查1969-2015年间美国LGBTQ+媒体上对权利主张和法院裁决的描述。对数据的分析将首先确定和检查LGBTQ+社区中法律问题的重要性如何随着时间的推移而变化，并评估是什么影响了这些变化。其次，研究人员将研究LGBTQ+群体法律意识的时间变化，并找出这些变化的原因。这些分析将揭示文化、社会、政治和法律因素如何影响边缘化社区法律概念的突出程度和该社区法律意识的特征，包括对法律和政治行为者的态度。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.