Rahmentheorie

Rahmentheorie is a theoretical approach in communication and social sciences that analyzes how media messages, political discourse, and cultural texts shape audience understanding by presenting issues through recurring frames. A frame, in this sense, is a set of conceptual devices—salient problem definitions, causal explanations, moral judgments, and recommended actions—that structure interpretation and steer attention toward certain aspects of a situation while de-emphasizing others.

The tradition traces to Erving Goffman's frame analysis, which describes how people interpret social events through cognitive frames, and was extended to mass communication by scholars such as Robert Entman, Dietram Scheufele, and others. Entman's framing functions—selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in order to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and remedy—are often cited.

Applications include political communication, news framing of policy issues, health communication, and crisis response. Researchers distinguish frame building (how frames emerge in media and discourse) from frame setting (how frames influence audience perceptions and opinions). Frames interact with existing audience beliefs and knowledge, producing heterogeneous effects.

Critiques emphasize construct validity in identifying frames, potential over-simplification, and the risk of manipulation. The theory also intersects with agenda-setting and priming, offering a complementary lens for understanding media influence.

In German-speaking contexts, Rahmentheorie is used as the term for this approach, though the English literature frequently uses framing theory or frame analysis.