Garrett 18
the case-study interviews and 3.0 in all interviews.
14
The modal response is 3.0 frames in all
interviews. More importantly, the frequencies (rankings) in which interviewees describe crises
reflecting each frame are highly consistent across interview types. In addition, there is no
evidence of significant partisan differences in complexity of describing campaign crises (based
on crosstabs of the coded data and Fisher’s exact tests for significance with small cell Ns and
2
for larger cell Ns).
The complete list of crisis frames and a detailed coding scheme appears in the Appendix.
Frequencies of frames employed in answering Question 1 appear in Tables 2-4 Table 2 is the
guiding source in this section of the paper since my analysis concentrates on the first-round
interviews. For comparison, Table 3 displays the frequency of various fames in the case-study
interviews; Table 4 does so across both first-round and case-study interviews. Table 5 lists
comparative rankings (by frequency) of each crisis frame across all interview groups. Readers
interested in verifying the unity in how political professionals describe campaign crises across
interviews might look ahead to Table 5. It is worthwhile to note that, except in a few cases, the
interviews display remarkable consistency, with almost all rankings across interviews falling
within one of two places of each other. However, the most important part of the analysis is the
commentary political professionals provide in discussing how they describe campaign crises.
Similarly, some of the most interesting and promising findings in the data were mentioned only
sparsely. Therefore, the quantitative data in tables is not intended to represent a strict hierarchy
of political professionals’ conceptualizations of campaign crises, nor in the potential damage
they say each kind of crisis element can inflict.
Before analyzing the individual crisis frames, it is essential to preview the fact that the
interview data present and overwhelmingly interactive and complex characterization of how
14
The means are 3.39, 4.14 and 2.69 respectively.
Convention