5 - Studying Policy Constellations in the Real World

Summary

This chapter describes the methods I applied in studying drug policy making in the UK. I am interested in how people's interpretations of reality affect their actions, interactions and outcomes, a task for which ethnography (including auto-ethnography) is suited (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Ellis et al, 2011). I am interested in other people's perspectives on these processes, so I interviewed people with particular relevant positions in the policy field. I am also interested in how ideas and narratives operate in the making of policy, so I used discourse analysis. As I have adopted critical realist presuppositions, this had to be a critical realist form of discourse analysis (Flatschart, 2016). I am also interested in how policy actors and ideas operate through the networks of connections between them. I found social network analysis (SNA) to be a valuable tool. Combined, these methods enable me not only to identify the motivations and actions of individual policy actors but also to assess the shared, generative mechanisms of policy action.

Data analysis is – in the critical realist tradition – a cyclical process. It moves between tentative, plausible explanations which are developed inductively from available data to fallible, deductive, empirical testing and refinement of developing explanations. In critical realist analysis, this is known as abduction (Danermark et al, 2019). It is compatible with the adaptive approach of Derek Layder (1998), which I also drew on in planning my analysis.

Here, I describe how I applied this approach in carrying out ethnography, elite interviews, discourse analysis and SNA in studying drug policy constellations in the UK. I also discuss some of the ethical issues involved in each method. My approach to these issues was approved by my university's research ethics process.

Casing and sampling for ethnography, interviews and documents

It is not possible to encompass the entirety of any policy field in one book. Choices must be made of the cases and samples to observe. Casing is a crucial step in all social science. ‘Science studies cases which [are] instances of a particular situation or set of circumstances’ (Byrne, 2009, p 1). For this book, I chose to study the parts of the policy field that I found to be most illuminating of the processes of policy making in the UK.