Stickiness is an empirical pursuit: the case for reframing child mental health

Everyone wants his or her issue to be sticky these days-to be talked about, get into the news, get in front of influential people, and so forth. However, the concept of stickiness, as put forward by scholars Chip and Dan Heath, is more than a fancy new term for salience. Rather, stickiness is defined in a way that recognizes the last several decades of research in the cognitive and social sciences on how people think about complex social issues. In this article, we argue that stickiness is an empirical pursuit, one that requires an accretion of methods from across the cognitive and social sciences but which, if pursued systematically, can contribute significantly to public understanding. Drawing from the FrameWorks Institute's development of Strategic Frame Analysis, we demonstrate how our methods can be used to pursue stickiness and with what effects. Applying this approach to the issue of child mental health, we demonstrate why approaches that posit resonance or salience are likely to prove ineffective in helping the public to prioritize prevention and treatment for child mental illness or promotion of child mental health.