 In this video, we're going to be talking about Chapter 3, Constructing Conditions. From the book, Thinking about Social Problems, we'll be reviewing concepts from the chapter that will be on the exam. So to begin with, I want to do a little exercise that requires you to observe the following slides. And you're going to see a word in a slide. And I want you to think about a picture in your mind that you see when you encounter this word. And then after a couple of seconds, I will show you a picture. And I want you to think about whether or not the picture I show is similar to the picture you envisioned in your mind. So let's get started. Poverty, Wealth, Disabled, Older Adults, Youth, Children, Professional, Worker. So there is a very good chance that as you went through those slides and looked at those words, the picture that you had in your mind was very similar to the pictures that I showed you. They may have been slightly different because of your cultural background or your own personal experiences. But even if they were different when I showed you the pictures, you probably went, yeah, that works. That's what typifications are. Typifications are shortcuts that we have in our communication that allow us to kind of be on common ground with each other. You probably have heard of stereotypes. Stereotypes are a category within typifications. So stereotypes are typifications, but not all typifications are stereotypes. These are important in claims making because the better that you can do the shortcuts, the more you can keep your audience's attention. So we're going to talk about what typifications are and then we're going to talk about how they work with audiences in making social problems claims. So because typifications are essentially useful in communications, typifications come in the basic forms of communication. So verbal, we use words and these particular words evoke a common image in our mind. Also graphics visual. You can see on the slide alone that we have at the bottom right thief and or burglar would come to mind at the bottom center you probably think disabled or handicapped the bottom left savings. Pinching pennies to the left of the words here the speaker, you probably can think freedom of speech or voice or being heard, or just speaking. So all of these pictures do evoke and communicate kind of a shortcut for an idea that behaviors also are important. When we observe other people doing ritualistic kinds of behaviors like gestures. We shortcut communication on that. If you see somebody raising their left fist up high, you probably think resistance or power. If you see somebody coming towards you holding their hand out, you immediately think friendliness, you know, politeness. So, all three of these are sources of typifications, and they make communication easier and shorter, more concise. So in using typifications and social problems claims making, you are essentially ensuring that the audience will see the same answers to questions that you are trying to get across to them. So, the more you can use typifications the quicker you can get your audience's attention. Now, why is this important. Well, first of all, I want to clarify that low ski is not talking about this, because she is trying to prescribe a successful way to make a social problems claim. She is really talking about this because she has observed social problems claims and this is what they have in common. And so, then she is asking the question, well, why do they have this in common. And one of the answers that she came up with is that audiences can only take in so much. We have so much information flowing in our society now, and even more so than when low ski wrote this book. And so you are when you are trying to make a case to a particular audience about a social problem when you're trying to make that claim. You have to keep in mind that you are competing. You're not, you're competing. First of all, just with all the things that are going on in a public arena. So, every time you tweet, every time you say something on Facebook type something on Facebook. Every time you put something on a blog online. Every time anybody talks about something on television. That has to do with a social problems claim. Audiences are not only looking at the social problem that you're talking about. But they're thinking about things like the Kardashians or what's the latest Tom Hanks film or what's going on on tick tock. You know, all of these things are competing with the message that you're trying to get out. In addition to that, there are a lot of social problems. So you're making claims about one area of social problems like maybe the environment that you're competing with people who are talking about poverty. Or who are talking about Black Lives Matters or we're talking about crime, we're talking about all these different other issues. So you not only have to get your audience's attention and competition with more or less serious items that you're also competing with people who are giving serious messages. And then of course within your claims. So if you're trying to talk about environmentalism. You may be talking about the need to recycle that somebody else may be talking about holding corporations accountable. And you're saying while recycling is something that needs to be done, but they're saying, you know, carbon credits also need to be done. So you're not just competing with other social problems claims and with less serious stuff that are in the public arena that you're also competing with claims about the same social problem that you're dealing with. So this competition makes that concession of typifications more important because you want to get to your point and get their attention quickly. Get them to understand what you're talking about quickly so that they don't have too high of a carrying capacity with what you're trying to talk to them about. And they lose interest or they get distracted by these competing things that are buying for their attention as well. So in making an argument. The use of typifications comes in the way in which people are grounding their arguments for their, the conditions that they're trying to construct. So how do you ground your argument? Well, you begin, most social problems claims begin with objective realities. So we are, we have been talking or continue to talk about social construction that that social construction is not the opposite of objectivity. Objective realities are simply facts. This is an important point that I want you to pay attention to not just because it'll help you understand what Loski is talking about in the chapter, but also because you have an assignment called issues background in this course. That assignment is where you go and examine the facts that are part of this issue. The facts don't change no matter what kind of social problem you are or solution you are constructing no matter what claim you are making, you will have to deal with this objective reality. But the facts only present part of the problem. You have to interpret these flat facts in such a way as to make your case. And one of the things that is required and making this case is you have to look for where things are harmful. And this may sound a little strange, but you're not going to have a problem if you can't demonstrate harm is being done. It can be a tricky construction because if you are too good at this, instead of capturing your audience's imagination and getting them to think about solutions, they may be overwhelmed and feel helpless. So you need to construct something that creates a kind of panic because you're trying to get people to make a change that you don't want them to panic so much that they give up and they feel like it's just too big of a problem to deal with, or it's just way beyond their control. So you're taking these objective facts and you're looking to point out the ways in which these, this reality is harming at least a small group, at least a group of people. And then the final thing that you have to bring in in order to demonstrate that this is a social problem and not a personal problem is the scope and size of this harm. So you need to show that a group of people who are getting harmed and that this is a problem that will grow in size if we are not going to address it. So you can see that the constructing of these conditions are always going to be a little on the negative side. They're always going to be creating a problem or constructing a problem as urgent, as harmful, as something that ought to make you panic a little bit. But there are slightly different ways to frame that construction of conditions, and this is what Lowsky gets into in the chapter. We're going to talk about two of these three forms of framing and then the third form we're going to talk about later in chapter five. So framing just means sort of what you emphasize what becomes the focus of your argument. So we're going to talk about diagnostic framing diagnostic framing focuses on what type of problem and is and who cause who or what causes the problem. So you know diagnostic we're making a diagnosis, the diagnosis is this is a problem of a particular type, and this person or conditions help cause this problem. We're also going to talk to in this chapter about motivational framing now this instead of emphasizing the problem emphasizes. So it will motivate the audience to do something. So it's trying to convince the audience that they should see this condition as intolerable, meaning something has to change. And then the third way that we're going to the third framing that we're going to talk about later in chapter five is what is called prognostic framing prognosis is looking at what the future is going to hold. So prognosis is looking at the past and saying what the problem is prognostic frame is referring to the prognosis, what should be done in order to correct this problem. So let's talk about diagnostic frames first. Lowsky points out that a lot of times in diagnostic frames what we're really looking at or what sociologists call structural factors or social forces. So, you've heard many people use the word systemic in the past. When referring to particular issues and problems. So, probably the one that's most popular in the news in 2020 is systemic racism. So, the diagnosis is that there is something not just wrong with individuals and their prejudices, but there's something wrong in the way things are structured. The way organizations are made that lead to a reproducing of this discrimination against particular groups. So part of diagnostic framing often emphasizes structural or social factors that are contributing to the to the conditions that you're trying to construct while you're making your social problems claim. So prognostic frames tend to be simple. You know, you know, most social issues are very complex. And, you know, since we're using the term diagnosis and talking about medical stuff. Your doctor loves it when you have an acute illness. So you come in, you have a cold. You're told you have a cold. You caught the cold because you have a virus. You know, 14 days of rest, you're going to be over the cold. It's a very simple. Here's, here's what caused it. Here's what's. Here's what will make it well. And we're done. And those kinds of problems are more comfortable for doctors. If you come in with a chronic illness that doesn't have a clear cause and may be triggered by a number of different events at different times and changes symptoms from day to day and overlaps with a lot of other symptoms and other diseases. And you have to take a long time to try to figure out, is it a or is it B or is it C. That makes it very, very difficult for a doctor to do their job. Well, the same is true when you are trying to diagnose the social problem. And so the more simple you can make it, the more you will engage your audience and get them to think about the conditions that you are constructing in your argument. Another part of this diagnostic framing is familiarity. What we mean by this is the more you can and this is where typifications also come in. The more you can hook into an existing ideas about social problems, existing ideas about these conditions, the better chance you have of getting your audience because the audience is familiar already with a particular, the particular framing with a particular diagnosis. So a couple of examples of this that she talks about. She talks about something called piggybacking. So a perfect example of piggybacking is the social problems claims that have gone on about texting while you are driving. So Mothers Against Young Drivers, we've mentioned several times and we'll mention multiple times in discussing social problems claims. Mothers Against Young Driving was a very successful campaign. By the end of the 1980s, people, it was part of the culture, you know, they, the, the idea that you don't drink and drive was no longer a debatable thing. It was pretty much a lot of everybody knew it. Everybody knew what you meant when you said it. Most people sanctioned other people when they were drinking. It was common within parties and so forth to take the keys away from somebody who had been drinking a lot to arrange to make sure that people had alternative rides home. All of these were changes in the culture and is, you know, the 1990s and partying was very different from the 1970s and partying. So when texting while driving became a big deal, they began to piggyback on that idea of don't drink and drive. And so you have these mottos and advertising and PSAs that say don't text and drive. They use the exact same language because what they are trying to do is get across the same idea by taking something familiar and saying, see, this is just like that. So piggybacking is an excellent way to create and expand a diagnostic frame because people are already and socialized to think in that particular way. The other thing that she talked about is something she called domain expansion. So that's basically where a social problem has already been accepted as a problem. And you're saying this is part of that too. So you're essentially like inserting a new idea into an existing argument and saying, okay, so you accepted that this is part of that. Probably a good example of this is talking about climate change where there were a number of people who understood pollution, understood environmental impact in the 70s after the passage of the EPA and after the environmental movement began and began to have effect. There were laws that changed. There were ideas and culture that changed around the idea of clean air and clean water. And then you come along in the 90s and early 2000s and people are talking more fully about carbon emissions and about global warming and these kind of things. And they hooked into that previous idea about pollution. So so much so that there even began to be a debate about whether or not the EPA should be paying attention to carbon emissions. When carbon emissions were not really part of what they thought about when they thought about pollution in the past. So, you know, not all carbon emissions create pollution, but they expanded the idea that if you care about the environment then you need to care about carbon emissions by expanding the domain of addressing environmentalism to include global warming to include climate change. It's very important though with the diagnostic framing that you can go too far. If you put out a message that says, you know, I guess the best way to put this is that when you are trying to get across the idea that something is pervasive that something is that a condition is something that needs attention that it is something bad and you're trying to get across in that framing that this is important. This is urgent. You're perilously, perilously close to conspiracy theories. So you can make it sound like, you know, like, for instance, when you talk about how, and again we're using environmentalism here, when you talk about what companies that pollute are doing. It's one thing to make a case that there is this side effect of industrialism that creates pollution that needs to be controlled and so forth. But if you push that to the point where you're saying there's an evil cartel somewhere that wants to exploit our environment and pollute everything without care and all they care about is profits and that they never think about doing anything other than disobeying this, you can get to the point where you sound a little crazy and where you sound, you know, a little bit like a conspiracy theorist. And it's so, you know, we're talking about don't go too far. Again, the other reason for this is that you don't want to make a sound when you're constructing these conditions that there's nothing that could be done about it. If you convince your audience that it's so bad that they can't do anything, they lose interest, because you know what, what could I do and that's the end of the conversation. So, diagnostic framing has to be kind of a delicate thing and you have to be careful not to go over that line. You want to make sure that you get across that this is a problem, and it is a problem that needs to be addressed and it's urgent, but you don't want to go so far as to convince people that nothing can be done about it. So, let's turn to motivational frames. So, keep in mind that diagnostic framing very often is a very logical argument, a logical presentation that relies very often on data and is, you know, trying to convince the mind as much as the heart or maybe more than the heart that there is something going on that needs to be addressed. Motivational framing is more emotional. It's more trying to get you to feel that you need to do something. The idea of intolerable means that you can't accept the way things are, and that is a way to motivate you to do something to change it. Oftentimes, because you are trying to evoke an emotional response, the framing includes what we've talked about before with cultural themes. Now, cultural themes are kind of typification often. If you use these words like individualism, nationalism, capitalism, family, fair play, religion, all of these evoke very specific typifications that help evoke that emotion that you're looking for to motivate people to do something about the problem that you're trying to get them to pay attention to. So, the strategies are often varied, you know, are doing more than one thing as it were. You may be, you know, talking about how this is patriotic and, you know, good for your family, you know, you evoke, you know, multiple cultural themes. You also want to tap into what Lowsky calls popular worry, meaning these are things that people talk about that they think are a big problem. So if you can, if you know that most people are talking about like for instance here in 2020 when I'm recording this, a very popular worry is the pandemic, of course. So you will see, and I have seen and observed people who are also talking about other issues than the pandemic will use, you know, if you're worried about people going to, who are going to die from COVID, you're going to also worry about people who are going to die from global warming. You'll see stuff presented that said more people die from blah, blah, blah, them from COVID. Right. And the reason that people are talking about this and that way is they see this in popular discourse, this popular worry. And by tapping into that worry, you can say, okay, you're worried about this, you should also be worried about that. And then the other strategy is to show that conditions are symbolic. What she means by this is that if you are tapping into a particular condition, you want to get across that it symbolizes something bigger than just the thing that you're talking about. So you may talk about global warming, creating more hurricanes. So this year has been tremendously bad in terms of hurricanes. We actually went through the alphabet of all the alphabet names, which is 26 storms, and then we went further into the Greek alphabet. And I think the last count that I heard was something like 32, 33 forms named storms this year. Okay, so yes, we know from people who have made arguments about global warming that more hurricanes are a particular sign of this global warming that, you know, different severe weather events are. So then you can shortcut that, if you will, and make hurricanes a kind of symbol of that global warming. So when people talk about now, oh my God, there were so many hurricanes this year in the Atlantic, you have made that connection. So the next thing that most people then talk about is, was this from global warming was this from climate change. So this condition itself, you know, here's the facts, here's the thing that we have demonstrated as part of the problem part of the conditions. And we have put this as a symbol it becomes it becomes so much a part of the motivational frame that it itself becomes a symbol of the problem that you were talking about. And those strategies that she outlined are what she has observed have been successful in creating this motivational framing of that social problem. So let's talk about strategies a little further. So in all framing, you are going to use typifying stories and we're going to talk in later chapters about this idea of a formula story. Here's the, there is some problems with using typifying stories. As we talked about, we are simplifying this. And because we are simplifying it, we're going to pick the presentation of facts that support our ideas support the panic that you want to evoke support the motivation that you want to create. So we're going to leave out things that might work a little bit against that. And by leaving out those facts, you are essentially shaping the story or constructing the story in a particular way. And that can be okay if you're trying to convince people to support you but later on when you're actually trying to create a solution that can come back to bite you, because people think the solution ought to be simple, but most social problems don't have simple solutions and have complex solutions with very nuanced ideas. And if you get lost in your own stories, you very often are not going to be successful in addressing the issue because you forget to bring back those facts that you left out and convincing your audience to pay attention. And another strategy that is, you know, part of it is to go to the most extreme of circumstances. And by going to those extreme circumstances, you risk your credibility like we talked about before where you kind of start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, instead of somebody who's reasonably arguing for policy. And then you also have reduced the complexity of the problem. Most problems are not as simple or as extreme as the stories or the conditions that are constructed in those stories suggest. The other thing is that most of these strategies work, not because the arguments are strong, or because the strategy has been successful in the sense of you've won the hearts and minds of people. But oftentimes the success of these strategies is dependent upon the right time, end quote. And the right time is kind of, well, shall we say, not the best of times. So disasters are very often followed by people making social problems claims, you know, the hurricanes that we talked about before, a good example. Climate change almost always comes up after a major hurricane has hit the continental United States. Also, you know, anytime something horrible happens in the news, people go and take that real life experience and start hooking onto that. You saw this with George Floyd's murder. And how that prompted people who had been protesting about police brutality for a long time and have been on the streets before, but because this real life example of severe extreme police brutality occurred. They're able to motivate their, the people who care about this issue to go back out into the streets and start protesting again. So these real life examples are taken advantage of probably rightly so. Because they keep the, the audience in this case, the audience is the public, it moves your issue into the public's mind. This is especially true if these disasters or these examples create what is called a moral shock. In other words, people are just sure that this is wrong. That's what we mean when we say moral, we're not really talking about any kind of religious creed or anything like that. People construct morality differently. But basically what we're talking about is right and wrong, what people think is right and what people think are wrong. So the quote unquote right time often is that moment in public discourse when people are shocked into feeling that something is very, very wrong. So the last concept in the chapter that we want to talk about is something called social problems ownership. This is the goal. This is what makes a social problems claims successful. So I want to make sure that you understand that success doesn't equal we solved the problem in low skis. So in her, her, in the theory that she is presenting in this book, social problems success is how successful, how successfully a social problems claims maker has gotten their audience to own the social problem to understand it as a social problem, you want to do something about it. And that is what makes a social problems successful. The, the more successful social problems claims become a way for people to, to think from that moment forward about those problems. So she brings up mothers against drunk driving in the chapter and this is a very good example of how the diagnosis that they made is now taken for granted. So when mothers against driving began their work in the late 1970s, their first audience were police officers and judges. And they went in and said, you know, the problem is enforcement. So that was their diagnosis. There are laws on the books against drunk driving, but when somebody gets caught for it. They oftentimes are not arrested, which is where the police came in or if they are arrested and go to court. They are not prosecuted to the full extent of the law, because before mothers against drunk driving. Most people thought of drunk driving as, you know, that thing you do sometimes when you're not your judgment is low impaired but you know everybody's done it. So, you know, why would we be upset with people who make that little mistake every once in a while. Well, of course, to the family members who lost somebody to a drunk driver. That was a very cavalier attitude. So they go to these police officers and these judges and they demonstrate to them through their testimony and their data and so forth. This is a problem. And this problem is causing people to be injured and die. Now people think that that diagnostic frame that they created is now taken for granted. And you really all you have to do is just watch television cop shows in the 1960s and 70s and see how cringe worthy they are now because you see how they treated drunk driving as comic relief. Oh, haha, that guy got drunk and now we got to put him in jail overnight he'll sober up and then we'll send him on his way kind of thing. Whereas if you look at, you know, police shows in the 80s and later, you know, drunk driving is this very serious thing and you see a lot of shows in the culture that, you know, the bad guy is somebody who drinks and drives. So that is now taken for granted. It seems silly to us that it never was a thing, you know, that it wasn't always a thing that there was a time when people didn't think it was bad to drink and drive. And social problems ownership, then if you successfully create this taken for granted aspect of it, that's probably, you know, a social problem that has been owned by its audience is probably going to be the social problems that are piggybacked on. So she's saying, you know, this is these successes lead to other successes to the extent that people can build on these successes. And one of the signs that you have successfully created social problems ownership is that other people are piggybacking on it.