Measuring collective action frames: A linguistic approach to frame analysis

By focusing on the interpretative aspect of mobilization, the framing perspective has provided significant insights to the social movements literature. Despite the growing number of studies focused on collective action frames, and master frames, the choice of how to investigate frame dynamics remains controversial. This paper explores the question of how researchers could empirically depict and measure framing tasks and frame components by focusing on the linguistic properties of social movement texts. It looks at semantic grammars as a possible way to craft linguistically based coding schemes able to extract collective action frames, as organic systems of meaning, from social movement discourses. It is shown how a “frame semantic grammar” could provide a reliable method of investigation to go from texts to frames, across case studies and research questions.