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Analysis of maternal and child health policies in Malawi: The methodological perspective
Daire, J. & Khalil, D.
Abstract
The question of why most health policies do not achieve their intended
results continues to receive a considerable attention in the literature. This
is in the light of the recognized gap between policy as intent and policy
as practice, which calls for substantial research work to understand the
factors that improve policy implementation. Although there is substantial
work that explains the reasons why policies achieve or fail to achieve their
intended outcomes, there are limited case studies that illustrate how to
analyze policies from the methodological perspective. In this article, we
report and discuss how a mixed qualitative research method was applied
for analyzing maternal and child health policies in Malawi. For the purposes
of this article, we do not report research findings; instead we focus our
dicussion on the methodology of the study and draw lessons for policy
analysis research work. We base our disusssion on our experiences from
a study in which we analyzed maternal and child health policies in Malawi
over the period from 1964 to 2008. Noting the multifaceted nature of
maternal and child health policies, we adopted a mixed qualitative research
method, whereby a number of data collection methods were employed.
This approach allowed for the capturing of different perspectives of
maternal and child health policies in Malawi and for strengthening of
the weaknesses of each method, especially in terms of data validity. This
research suggested that the multidimensional nature of maternal and
child health policies, like other health policies, calls for a combination of
research designs as well as a variety of methods of data collection and
analysis. In addition, we suggest that, as an emerging research field, health
policy analysis will benefit more from case study designs because they
provide rich experiences in the actual policy context.
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