INTERPRETIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS 339EISs, decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of information, and the normative premises of
policy recommendations.
Assessing Structure and Story Line—Framing the Issue
of Wilderness Designation
The outline or structure of a technical document is linked to its communication purpose or mes-
sage.^4 This message is a key element of the narrative or story line of the document. The underly-
ing structure and story line of the EISs is twofold: (1) cause and effect, that is, federal decisions as
a cause and impacts of such decisions as effects, and (2) comparisons of different decisions’
impacts on components of the environment. In the BLM wilderness EISs, the federal decisions
consisted of recommendations for or against wilderness designation of parcels of public land
called wilderness study areas. To tell the cause-effect story of EISs, agency personnel had to
define the components of the environment that would be affected by such decisions.
To assess the story line of the documents, I examined the structure of the 101 wilderness EISs
and the substantive content of the specific headings they employed. What I mean by structure is
the order in which the headings were sequenced; things like “resource programs” or “wilderness
study areas” are the content meaning of the headings. To do this, I examined the first, second, and
third levels of documentary organization in the texts of the forty-eight pairs of draft and final
EISs, one unpaired draft, and four unpaired final reports. The analysis showed that the dominant
structure of some of the EISs changed as they went from draft to final form. All but one of the
final documents I reviewed used wilderness study areas as the first order of organization. Thus,
the structure in the final EISs was nearly uniform in telling a story about how various options for
wilderness designation would affect wilderness study areas. In contrast, some drafts used re-
source programs in the agency (minerals, range [i.e., livestock grazing], wildlife, recreation, cul-
tural resources) as the first order of organization. The message in these EISs changed from a draft
story line about how wilderness designation might affect agency programs to a final story line
about how wilderness designation might affect study areas. This change reframed the issue of
wilderness designation.
The reframing can be understood in terms of plot, subplot, and main and supporting charac-
ters. The main plot in the final EISs concerns places (specific wilderness study areas), with names
and human activities (wilderness designation, resource use) that may affect the character of those
places in the future. The subplot is about how resource programs might be affected by such
wilderness designation (in the main plot). The main “characters” are study areas, and programs
play supporting roles. In contrast, some draft EISs tell a story in which programs are main char-
acters in a plot about how designating certain areas as wildernesses might affect them. Study
areas serve as “scenery” in the background of this plot and, in a few cases, do not appear at all.
Thus, the structural change from draft to final EISs shifted attention away from programs and
toward study areas in stories about how future wilderness designation of those areas might affect
their existence. Through this change, wilderness designation was reframed in a way that de-
emphasized its potential impact on agency operations. The reframing provided a positive basis
for designating public lands as wilderness by redirecting the focus of analysis to areas where the
presence of wilderness values had already been established.
In commenting on my interpretation of these data in a journal submission, one reviewer sug-
gested an alternative interpretation of the reframing of EIS structures: “The change might argu-
ably have resulted from an objective of providing a more uniform structure to these planning
documents, rather than efforts by BLM and OEPR staff to frame the wilderness arguments.” The