Complicating the Policy Analysis Construct. In order to explain how this thesis relates to the ‘policy analysis’ construct, a shift of focus is needed from the notion that policy research is the production of knowledge to be used in the policy process, to a broader understanding of the term, including studies that take the notion of ‘policy’ as the object of research. Xxxxxxxxx (2012: 156) defines policy analysis as any study concerned with ‘public policies and their impacts’. I support this definition because it is broad enough to include any study examining public policies in some way. However, the field of policy analysis has been fiercely guarded and historically reserved only for studies that maintain a positivist (classical modernist) approach and mirror the methodological rigour of the natural sciences (Hajer 2003). Any study using the term policy study must relate to the privileges policy studies with a strict focus on ‘scientific’ or technical knowledges enjoy (cf. Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx 1993; Xxxxx and Xxxxxxxx 2003). Xxxxxxx (2011) makes a useful distinction in relation to the term ‘policy analysis’ in her attempt to move beyond the limitations of the narrow definition of conventional policy analysis. She argues that policy analysis refers to all forms of research that are conducted for or about the policy process. Research conducted ‘for’ policy includes any study of any phenomenon that is conducted to inform, support or evaluate the policy process (Xxxxxxx 2011). The general purpose of this form of policy analysis is to assist the political process in achieving its goals. This includes, for example, the comparative research described in page 16; a study that identifies and quantifies the correlations that can operate as factors that measure and compare the sexual risk behaviours among youth in different countries. Among the research that falls into the ‘about’ category, policy analysis refers to a family of approaches devoted to the study of the phenomenon, circumstances or effects more broadly of the policy- making process itself (Xxxxxxx 2011). This would include those studies that explore the policy process, but also studies that seek to explain the social and political experience of the institutional process in diverse ways (Xxxxxxx 2011). The legitimate sphere of policy analysis has traditionally been defined as those studies that fall within the ‘for’ category (Shaw 2010), that is, as studies aspiring to bring the dominant methodologies of ‘scientific’ knowledge into the political s...
