Evaluating Public Discourse in Newspaper Opinion Articles: Values-Framing and Integrative Complexity in Substance and Health Policy Issues

The exchange of opinions is an important component of participatory democracies, and newspaper forum pages have been hailed as a conduit for such discussion. This research explored Schwartz's value framework to characterize lay and journalist frames in a national sample of local newspapers. A content analysis was conducted on newspaper forum articles on health policy issues—notably, alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, and crime—for the presence and complexity of value frames. Significant differences in values were found by article type and topic. Values typically associated with liberalism were also predictive of greater integrative complexity.