Quantitative Frame Analysis Of Genetic Engineering Issues Based On Semantic Network Analysis

The safety issue of genetic engineering (GE) or genetically modified (GM)technology and GM food has been a typical one in risk society. Different social entities discuss GE issue based on their social interests, so they develop various issue frames.Public discourse about the GE issue influence the policy agenda, while media contents affect the attitudes of the public about GE, which in turn will affect public discourse in the future. Recently, WeChat Official Account Admin Platform (WeChat Official Accounts) makes it wider for news consumption. We want to explore two research questions: What are the issue frames of GE among the public? What are the issue frames of the media? Based on the answer of the two questions, what people want to know about GE, the framing bias of media and the difference between media frames and the audience frames will be clear, which will give Chinese government and media an insight into how to make full use of the WeChat Official Accounts to promote science communication and improve scientific literacy of the public.The dissertation consists of three parts. The first one is the construct of quantitative method of issue frame analysis for Chinese news coverage, in the context of big data and information explosion. The second one and the third one will study the media frame and the audience frame of GE issue respectively based on the proposed quantitative method.The first part of the dissertation is the construction of the proposed quantitative method. Based on the inductive approach, semantic network analysis is introduced here to extract the issue frames for all the sample. First the corpus of whole sample is constructed. The semantic network for the corpus is extracted based on the co-occurrences of the words and divided into several clusters based on cluster analysis.The frames for the clusters are interpreted by coders and all of these frames are for all the sample. Next, based on the modified Bag-of-words model, quantitative statistics of each frame for each unit (time, media) of analysis are obtained. The proposed quantitative method will promote objectivity and improve the efficiency of frame analysis.The second part is the semantic network analysis of the issue frames of the WeChat Official Accounts. 824 articles were collected and the frames were extracted and visualized from whole sample. Frames covering many topics, such as safety regulation,labeling policy, science communication and disclosure of GE events are not evenly distributed. People want to get information about GE, but the articles about GE are not of good quality. Articles of high quality are of a small number. Science communication via WeChat Official Accounts will depend on authoritative accounts and credible sources of information, which ensures more quality for articles.The third part is to explore the framing bias of GM news for three different types of WeChat Official Accounts such as media that belong to central government, media that focus on the people's daily life and social events and media that aim for science communication. There are 6 frames: progress, economics, science popularization,social influence, risk and safety regulation and science and research. Different media have their own preferences for reporting different frames of GE while most people only receive messages from part of the media accounts. The effect of one-sidedness of information is the result of those who receive messages from part of the media accounts.Media accounts with large number of audience, especially the media that belong to central government should pay attention to the imbalance of GM information.Based on the results above, suggestions about the science communication of GE are given for Chinese government and media. First, the content of the media coverage and the information demand from the public should be balanced. Chinese government and media should construct specific issue frames and should ensure that the public demand of the scientific knowledge and GE information are met. Second, rumors from WeChat Official Accounts should be managed under control. Proactive management of rumor and disclosure of information should be established by the government to improve the scientific literacy.