Media Frames of Voluntary Childlessness in the United States from 1989 to 2018
- PDF / 501,256 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 55 Downloads / 163 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Media Frames of Voluntary Childlessness in the United States from 1989 to 2018 Elizabeth A. Hintz 1
&
Amy Haywood 2
Accepted: 30 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Voluntary childlessness (VC) is a family communication issue which has garnered media attention for over 30 years. Guided by framing theory, in the present study we analyze media frames of voluntary childlessness in the United States between 1989 and 2018 to critically examine the formation of discourses governing childfree families over time. Guided by mixed method media frame analysis, 103 news articles were inductively thematized and then deductively coded to identify and quantify the dominant frames and the frame elements (i.e., story characters and generalizations to ongoing phenomena) that comprised them. Results first offer demographic information which provides necessary context to indicate from whom and where news coverage of VC is produced. Results further indicated five dominant frames of childfree families, seven character categories which elucidate who is (and is not) represented in news media coverage of VC, and three domains of generalizations which underscore the connection between VC and population changes, policy issues, and cultural and social shifts. Findings also offer empirical support for changes in frames and frame elements over time. The present findings offer a historical and culturally situated view of voluntary childlessness over the past three decades. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Keywords Mixed methods research . Communication theory . News media . Family communication . Voluntary childlessness
Nontraditional post-nuclear families, including those without children, have continued to proliferate in the United States (Baxter 2014). A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicated that approximately 45.1% of all U.S. women between the ages of 15 and 44 have never had a child (Martinez et al. 2018), with 6.0% being voluntarily childless or “childfree” (Martinez et al. 2012). The childfree resist the status quo which privileges the nuclear, biological family (Suter 2016) and violate normative pronatalist “social scripts” prescribing family life in the United States (Gillespie 2000; Pelton and Hertlein 2011). Consequently, voluntarily childless families are Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01197-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Elizabeth A. Hintz [email protected] 1
Department of Communication, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
2
Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
discourse dependent, in that they “depend, in part or whole, on communication to ‘define themselves for themselves’ with respect to family identity as they interact with outsiders, and one another” (Galvin and Braithwaite 2014, p. 103). Discourses ar
Data Loading...
