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The Discursive Turn in Policy Analysis and the Validation of Policy Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2012

LINDSAY PRIOR ,
DAVID HUGHES  and
STEPHEN PECKHAM
LINDSAY PRIOR*
Affiliation:
Centre of Excellence in Public Health & School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queen's University, Belfast
DAVID HUGHES
Affiliation:
Department of Public Health & Policy Studies, Swansea University email: d.Hughes@swansea.ac.uk
STEPHEN PECKHAM
Affiliation:
Department of Health Services Research & Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine email: stephen.Peckham@lshtm.ac.uk
*
email: l.prior@qub.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how ‘readings’ of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N = 20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000–09. Following the identification of some key characteristics of narrative structure the authors indicate how text-mining strategies allied with features of semantic and network analysis can be used to unravel the basic elements of policy stories and to facilitate the presentation of data in such a way that readers can verify the strengths (and weaknesses) of any given analysis – with regard to claims concerning, say, the presence, absence or relative importance of key ideas and concepts. Readers can also ‘see’ how the different components of any one story might fit together, and to get a sense of what has been excluded from the narrative as well as what has been included, and thereby assess the reliability and validity of interpretations that have been placed upon the data.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 271 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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