Policy research

Policy analysis can draw especially from two methods which see policy as an argument or a discourse that is not necessarily a positivist knowing of an issue but rather an argument of what a problem is and what should be done to address it. The first is Bacchi’s (1999) approach “What’s the problem represented to be” approach, and the second is Rein and Schon’s (1993) “frame reflexive policy analysis” both of which are termed “interpretive approaches” by Browne, Coffey, Cook, Meiklejohn, and Palermo (2018) which they emphasize mans that “policy problems are not pre-existing givens, but are historically and culturally produced” and “policy is understood as a process of discourse and argumentation” (p. 7).

To explain both, Bacchi’s (1999) “What’s the problem represented to be” approach works to study how policy is just one interpretation of a problem, complete with “presuppositions and assumptions that go unanalysed" and helps to fill gaps “by asking what remains unproblematized in certain representations” (Browne, Coffey, Cook, Meiklejohn, and Palermo, 2018, p. 7). To do this, a researcher needs to answer the following questions: What’s the problem represented to be? What assumptions underpin this problem representation? How has the representation come about? What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? What are the effects of this problem representation? Where is this representation of the problem produced, disseminated, and defended? How can this problem representation be questioned, disrupted, and replaced? For Rein and Schon’s (1993) “frame reflexive policy analysis” approach, as by Browne, Coffey, Cook, Meiklejohn, and Palermo (2018) note, the purpose of this approach “is a way of selecting, organizing, interpreting and making sense of a complex reality” and, among many different foci, can focus on policy discourses, rhetorical frames, and “meta-cultural frames which include broad, culturally share systems of belief that shape rhetorical and institutional frames” (p. 6). To use both for this analysis, I will first utilize Bacchi (1999) to understand the problem being represented and then utilize Rein and Schon (1993) (and inspired by Browne, Coffey, Cook, Meiklejohn, and Palermo, 2018) to help add the frame of TC onto the discussion to help answer how the classification can be discussed, described and understood.