Opt-Out Movement Examples

A critical task for social movements is to build support and mobilize for collective action. To do this, activists often use discursive tactics like framing {Snow:1986tg}. Frames are cognitive schema that people can use to interpret and make sense of social events (Goffman, 1974). Activists use frames to present social conditions as unjust and requiring change. A key assumption of framing research is that framing activities rely on an underlying ideological compatibility between the framer and the audience. If a frame does not comport with a person’s political orientation, she is less likely to find it compelling {Snow:2000wg, Oliver:1999fd, Feinberg:2012hq}. One notable aspect of the Opt-Out movement is its support among parents of diverging …show more content…
In education, there are a few examples of political coalitions forming between ideologically opposing parties, including the small school movement {Kafka:2008vd} and No Child Left Behind {DeBrayPelot:2009dd, Hursh:2007jb}. Yet, there is no evidence on the conditions under which ideologically diverse activists will form a social movement around a shared issue. Avowed support for an issue is not the same as engaging in social action in support of a position. How has the Opt-Out movement successfully mobilized a diverse group of participants for collective action? For Study Two, I will address two research questions:
1. How do activists in the Opt-Out movement frame issues related to standardized testing, the Common Core State Standards, and movement goals and tactics?
2. To what extent do frames deployed by the movement form distinct clusters and do they cluster vary by ideological …show more content…
Data will be collect over the timeframe from 2010 to 2016. To answer my first research question, I will use an inductively developed codebook to capture the different frames used by movement participants to characterize the movement, define social problems related to testing, and to articulate movement goals tactics. To answer the second research question, I will use network analysis to analyze the relationships among frames and among frames and movement organizations. Using the coded text corpus, I will create two networks: a co-occurrence network of frames and an affiliation network of frames and social movement groups. Based on this data, I will conduct two analyses. First, I will analyze the topology of the co-occurrence network using measures of centralization and community detection methods (e.g., Newman, 2006). Second, I will use the affiliation network to identify which social movement groups use which frames. These analyses will allow me to identify the existence of clusters of frames and associate those clusters with social movement