Framing Theory Overview

Framing is a social scientific concept that is used to describe how individuals interpret and respond to particular events or situations. In the conflict resolution field, framing is used to describe how individuals come to understand, characterize, and act upon their interpretations of a particular social conflict or dispute. A multifaceted concept, framing has been defined as:

• the process of interpreting what is going on or what is at issue in a particular dispute
• the process through which one organizes knowledge about the world
• the use of this knowledge to make sense of new information, events, or experiences
• a cognitive device used to guide interpretations of new experiences

Frames and Framing

Whereas framing refers to the overall process of conflict interpretation, frames are specific “collections of perceptions and thoughts that people use to define a situation, organize information, and determine what is important and what is not,”¹ or “an individualized definition of a situation based on an interplay of past experience and knowledge, and the existing situation.”²

Because conflicts are often complicated, and require the processing of a great deal of information from a variety of perspectives, frames provide a shorthand understanding of a conflict situation, by focusing only on those features deemed important by the particular individual involved. Frames are therefore interpretive devices that all people use when making sense of the world around them. They aid us in making the difficult task of processing complex and often cumbersome information about our social world much simpler, by focusing our attention only on certain features that we feel are important.

All individuals use frames to aid in deciding where and how we fit into the conflict and what, if anything, we can do in response. Just as a picture frame is used to create a border around a painting or photograph to crop out unimportant features of the image, a conflict frame is used by individuals to crop out particular features of the conflict, and to highlight what they feel is important.

This process of emphasizing certain features of the conflict by cropping or downplaying less prominent features allows the most important information to be filtered out from the large pile of information surrounding the dispute. However, different people see certain dimensions of conflicts in very different ways. What may be of primary importance to one stakeholder may not be important at all to another. Though framing provides a shorthand filtering of essential information, it also can generate conflicts through differing interpretations of the dispute, and disagreements over the importance of its component parts.

Framing and Dispute Resolution

Framing is important in dispute resolution. People often frame complex issues to simplify them in their own minds, and they often choose to use certain frames and ignore others. How people frame an issue is a reflection of what they define as central and critical to their objectives. Further, the framing process is often unintentional and unconscious; by learning about framing, we might be able to elevate it to a more conscious level and improve the dispute resolution process. And, finally, frames are malleable and can be shaped and reshaped through communication and information sharing during the dispute resolution process.

Framing affects environmental conflict resolution in several ways. Framing:

• shapes how issues are defined and what information is perceived to be relevant
• affects how people perceive risk
• guides how parties view themselves and others
• influences parties’ preferences for dispute resolution processes
• shapes what solutions people consider acceptable or unacceptable
• affects the likelihood of resolution or escalation

Framing is a useful tool for analysis, because it allows us to view the particular frames that people use when examining a particular conflict. If we, as students of conflict resolution, come to understand the various frames that individuals use to distinguish important from unimportant information, then we can achieve a better understanding of why people take the positions that they do, and we can learn about how and why people respond as they do when interpreting a particular dispute.

     ¹Roy Lewicki, Barbara Gray, and Michael Elliott, eds., Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003).