Frames of agency in a school with poor indoor-air quality: A longitudinal composite narrative study

Problems with schools' indoor-air quality are common, and they can cause health problems to adolescents. However, no previous research has examined how adolescents make sense of such contaminated socio-material environments or what kinds of agency those environments afford. Taking an ecological psychology perspective informed by frame analysis, we analysed longitudinal focus group interviews with adolescents in a Finnish school with longstanding indoor-air problems. We constructed three composite first-person narratives that reflected different experiential frames, with corresponding forms and changes of agency. We found that our adolescents made sense of the same socio-material environment and its affordances in very different ways, and this process afforded them to develop many kinds of agency that changed over time.

Framing the virus: The political, economic, biomedical and social understandings of the COVID-19 in Taiwan

The purpose of this paper is to study how people use texts and languages to interpret or make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on the theoretical literature of framing perspectives to formulate our arguments that consider the virus a socially constructed reality. We use Taiwan as an empirical case study, using topic modeling analysis of newspaper articles. Our findings show that the language of the COVID-19 coverage combines the four frames of political evaluation, economic impact, biomedical science and social life in varying proportions. These frames are subject to changes in pandemic conditions. Implications for theory and practice are presented.