Transcript frame analysis: Thinking with Goffman about interview data

This paper develops a phenomenological analysis approach to interview transcripts based on Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974). Inspired by his concepts of frame, strip and primary framework, my approach explores participants’ accounts of their experiences while offering an analysis of collective meaning making and its academic study. The workings of this approach are demonstrated using the example of a research project exploring the urban lives of UK university students. While my approach – that I call transcript frame analysis – is Goffmanesque in character, it also deviates from his ideas to build an applicable and methodological-grounded analysis tool that is reflexive towards the generation of situated knowledge. A key contention of this paper is that transcript frame analysis offers two types of findings, keyings and fabrications, to illuminate the patterned as well as contradictory nature of social meaning making.