College of Letters & Science

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Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework
(Montana State University Library, 2022) Jones, Michael D.; McBeth, Mark K.; Shanahan, Elizabeth A.
A long history of literature describes how stories are central to how humans understand and communicate about the world around them. The NPF applies these discoveries to the policy process, whereby narratives are meaning-making tools used to capture attention and influence policy outcomes. Conceived at the Portneuf School of Narrative in the early part of the century and formally named in 2010, the Narrative Policy Framework’s (NPF) initial purpose was to scientifically understand the relationship between narratives and the policy process. Since its seminal naming, the NPF’s charter has expanded to non-scientific approaches (Gray & Jones, 2015; Jones and Radaelli, 2015), to science and policy communication, as well as proclaiming normative commitments to both science and democracy. Recently, guideline publications have also been produced that provide detailed instructions about how to conduct NPF research. Along the way several summary pieces have chronicled the NPF’s development. Two of these NPF assessments were part of larger collections of NPF studies, including the 2014 edited volume The Science of Stories and a special NPF symposium issue featured in the Policy Studies Journal. On par with NPF collections emerging every four years, here we offer a third collection of NPF studies that represent some of the best NPF studies to date.
Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 9: A Narrative Policy Framework Solution to Understanding Climate Change Framing Research
(Pressbooks, 2022) Wolters, Erika Allen; Jones, Michael D.
The climate change framing literature is vast. So much so that researchers—whether seasoned framing scholars or those foraying into climate change framing research for the first time—can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of studies, the vast array of concepts deployed, the variation in how these same concepts are operationalized, the nuance of a barely numerable assortment of contexts, and the effects all of the aforementioned have on interpreting findings. Here we offer a synthetic review of said literature, focusing on adaptation and mitigation framing studies and findings. In so doing, we first briefly distill the overall developmental arc of climate change framing research. We then provide a conventionally styled thematic overview of the mitigation and adaptation climate change studies. Among other conclusions, we find that while there has been a proliferation of climate change framing research, the findings and the studies themselves are often quite disparate from one another. Moreover, as the literature speaks to itself intermittently and in an ad hoc fashion, it is not readily apparent how climate change framing studies holistically fit together. As a solution to this problem, we offer the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a narrative heuristic to help climate change researchers and communicators organize and understand the literature. We argue that an NPF integration of this inherently unwieldy literature increases the likelihood of research utilization and improves the ability of climate change communicators to inform people about the risks of climate change.
Narratives and the Policy Process: Applications of the Narrative Policy Framework. Chapter 4: Agreement and Trust: In Narratives or Narrators?
(Pressbooks, 2022) Lybecker, Donna L.; McBeth, Mark K.; Sargent, Jessica M.
Narratives concerning the working class and their relationship to climate change are important. In particular, how the narrative constructs the relationship and, within this, who communicates a narrative (the narrator) is key. That said, this is a less studied element; the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has limited research on narrators. Subsequently, this work examines individuals’ support of narratives and narrators using an Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey of 435 participants. After pretesting for climate change views, the subjects chose which narrator they expected to agree with: Mechanic Pat or Organic Farmer Chris. Through randomization, subjects joined either a congruent treatment group (Mechanic Pat tells the anti-climate change narrative and Organic Farmer Chris tells the pro-climate change narrative) or an incongruent treatment group (Mechanic Pat tells the pro-climate change narrative and Organic Farmer Pat tells the anti-climate change narrative). Results indicate that before reading the narratives, climate change “devotees” (those who agree that climate change is occurring and is human-caused) thought they would agree with Organic Farmer Chris over Mechanic Pat. Whereas there was division in the climate change “skeptics” (those who disagree that climate change is real and human-caused) on the question of what narrator they thought they would agree with. Devotees significantly supported the pro-climate change working-class narrative when told by Organic Farmer Chris as compared to when Mechanic Pat told the same narrative. Further showing the power of a narrator, devotees supported the anti-working class climate change narrative more when told by Organic Farmer Chris rather than when Mechanic Pat told the same narrative. Our findings demonstrate that narrators matter and suggest that the NPF needs to consider narrators as a narrative element worthy of further study.

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