A method for the critical analysis of science communication texts

ABSTRACT

We present a novel method for the critical analysis of professional scientists’ communications with the public. The method blends Entman’s (2007) [Framing bias: Media in the distribution of power. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 163–173)] framing theory and van Leeuwen’s (1996) [The representation of social actors. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard, & M. Coulthard (Eds.), Texts and practices readings in critical discourse analysis (pp. 32–104). Routledge] sociosemantic analysis to distill the relationship between written texts and larger political discourses circulating in society. We demonstrate our novel method by comparing two articles from a popular science publication, both of which discuss issues of gender equity in the professional STEM community. We close by discussing the affordances and limitations of our novel method and offering possible extensions of our method for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• critical discourse analysis
• framing analysis
• popular science
• science communication

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge and thank the members of our research group for helping us develop the ideas in this manuscript: Natalie Freed, Hakeoung Hannah Lee, Boram Lee, Adam Papendieck, Molly Novelli, and Emma Gargroetzi. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Ethics statement

This study used publicly available data, and therefore did not need ethical approval.