The FrameWorks Institute is a nonprofit research organization founded in 1999 to advance the nonprofit sector's communications capacity by identifying, translating, and modeling relevant scholarly research for framing the public discourse about social problems. It has become known for its development of "strategic frame analysis," which roots communications practice in the cognitive and social sciences.
FrameWorks designs, commissions, manages, and publishes multi-method, multi-disciplinary communications research to prepare nonprofit organizations to expand their constituency base, to build public will, and to further public understanding of specific social issues. Since its founding, the Institute has been concerned with public understanding of child and adolescent development.
Its work with the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child brings lessons from the cognitive and social sciences to bear on the translation of early brain development for broader audiences. Promising approaches employed currently by the Council include:
- Greater focus on explaining core scientific concepts and principles before jousting over competing interpretations of individual study findings.
- An empirical approach to knowledge transfer based on analyses of the dominant frames employed by target audiences to assimilate new information.
- Development, testing, and refinement of simplifying models to explain complex scientific concepts to non-scientific audiences.
- Modeling the role of an independent knowledge broker in the policy arena and differentiating it from that of a partisan advocate or a disengaged scientist.
