The framing paradigm in communication research: a study of recent trends

Framing Theory has evolved into a theoretical and empirical paradigm that is used by numerous disciplines in communication contexts. To explore the prevalence of framing related concepts and methods in various research fields, a framing research literature of the last four years was obtained from 84 peer reviewed journals and content analyzed for their respective fields of research and the methods used. The sample was obtained by multiple keyword searches on the Web of Knowledge database of SSCI indexed journals listed on the Journal Citation Report of the Institute for Scientific Information as "communication journals". The findings revealed that in the recent research in relation to framing theory or frames in communication analysis encompassed various disciplines in the social sciences which kept up the methodological diversity and the differences in theoretical approaches. Beyond this, it was found that the most used method was framing analysis with the aim to detect and define issue-specific frames in communication.