Framing Effects of Poverty News on Public Attitudes Toward Social Protection Policy in Nigeria

This study examines the effects of different news frames for poverty reporting on Nigerian public attitudes toward social protection policy, conducting an experimental framing study to generate causal evidence for media influence on welfare policy opinion. Nigeria's social protection infrastructure is underdeveloped relative to the scale of poverty affecting the population, and public and elite opinion about government responsibility for poverty alleviation significantly shapes policy investment. Framing theory predicts that whether poverty is attributed to individual failure or structural causes significantly affects audience attitudes toward redistributive policy. This study employs a two-by-two online survey experiment with 480 Nigerian participants randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: episodic-individual frame (poverty as personal failure), thematic-structural frame (poverty as systemic failure), combined episodic-structural frame, and control (no poverty story). All frames use real Nigerian poverty scenarios with identical factual content but different attributional framing. Dependent variables include support for social protection expansion, personal responsibility attribution, government responsibility attribution, and willingness to support redistributive taxation. Analysis of variance and regression with covariate adjustment are applied. Findings reveal significant framing effects, with thematic-structural framing producing substantially higher support for social protection policy expansion than episodic individual framing, consistent with framing theory predictions. Combined framing shows intermediate effects. Educational attainment moderates the framing effect, with better-educated respondents more responsive to structural frames. The study contributes causal framing effects evidence from Nigeria and recommends structural poverty framing guidelines for journalists covering social policy.

Keywords: framing effects, poverty news, social protection, Nigeria, experimental study.