Family Feuds: The Relationships between Legal Changes and Media Framing Concerning the Family
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do legal changes affect discourse concerning family forms? The concept of the family is conventionally assumed to be stable and unchanging; yet, the idea of family is continuously defined and redefined by the law. I analyze the nature of media framing before and after federal legislative changes, specifically the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and Windsor v. United States (2013). I investigate 156 articles about same-sex marriage legislation published in The New York Times. Results show that legislative events and court decisions influence the framing of family and family forms. DOMA influenced the discourse surrounding family composition by strictly defining the family unit, centering it on a heteronormative framework of one man and one woman. Windsor affected the discourse concerning the role of children by shifting the focus away from LGBT parents as unfit or dangerous to children and toward a structural and societal assessment of discrimination. Both DOMA and Windsor affected public discourse about morality. These findings support the idea that legal changes affect conceptions of the family and reveal how these conceptions can change in the broader public imagination.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".