Audiences and Cultural Representations: A Theoretical and Methodological Reconnaissance of Schemata Theory

Most research into media framing implicitly assumes that media frames as decoded by the receiver are equivalent to those contained in the message. It is also generally assumed that the researcher can cover these frames objectively. This paper poses two questions: why should and how can the analysis of media-frames take account of the perspective of the receiver. It addresses these questions based on
schemata theory, which draws on cognitive psychology and establishes how individual and cultural ‘frames’ shape each other recursively in the context of socio-economically stratified structuration processes. The methodological consequence of this demonstration is that research into media frames should not assume that media messages are mirrored in the recipient, but should instead address the question of how the mental schemes of the recipient resonate with the message.