Bacchi’s Techniques for Analysing Policy Documents Sample Clauses

Bacchi’s Techniques for Analysing Policy Documents. According to Xxxxxx, policy texts serve as a good source of empirical material because every policy proposal contains within it an explicit or implicit diagnosis of the ‘problem’ (2009: 1); that is, every policy proposal contains a ‘problem representation’. Xxxxxx develops Xxxxxxxx’x suggestion that ‘practical’ or ‘prescriptive’ texts provide entry-points for identifying problematisations and with it, she builds her approach to policy analysis (see Xxxxxx 2009, 2015). For Xxxxxx every policy or policy proposal is a prescriptive text, setting out a practice that relies on a particular problematisation. She uses the term ‘problem representation’ to refer to the form of a problematisation in a specific site (Xxxxxx 2009). Xxxxxx (2009) stresses that when studying problem representation ‘[t]he task is to identify deep conceptual premises operating within problem representations’ (Xxxxxx 2009: xix, emphasis in original). This is done at two levels: the concern (e.g., poor sexual health outcomes, poverty, exclusion, etc.) and what is represented to be the cause of the problem (e.g., lack of sexual education, poor decision making, poor access to contraceptives, etc.) which are documented in texts. At the level of causes, the analysis of presuppositions means that these can often be ‘read off’ from texts or policy documents (Xxxxxx 2016: 8). In other words, policy documents often indicate what is attributed to be problematic as they prescribe solutions that can improve or change the concern (Xxxxxx 2016). At the level of the concern, however, other secondary sources must be used as complement to provide both historical and spatial context to the empirical material and locate the knowledges, underlying assumptions and categories that sustain the presuppositions in problem representations (Xxxxxx 2016). The selection of both secondary sources and empirical material is explained further in the section about the material later in this chapter. Finally, Xxxxxx reaffirms that her approach (2009) follows a clear instrumental goal; to assess the usefulness, limitations and even the dangers of the effects of specific problem representations. By doing so, problematisations become visible and, in turn, open for debate (Xxxxxx 2015). In order to examine policy texts Xxxxxx (2009) articulates six questions and goals to help organise the analysis. Questions 1 to 6 (hereinafter Q1-Q6) are as follows: