How does the operation of PHARMAC's 'Community Exceptional ...

Qualitative research methods were described by Strauss and Corbin (1990) as
a variety of useful methods of gathering information when the research
perspective is a process or a social distribution. They also advised that
interviews are useful in gathering information on what happened and why. In
my study I researched the published material, official information and interviews
for deeper meaning which could be extracted by raising the particular
experiences described in this data to a more general meaning.
Marshal and Rossman (1999) caution that the more general meaning should
not be considered in the sense of a total truth, although they agreed that
qualitative methods do paint a valid picture of the general meaning. This study
searched for that general meaning about PHARMAC’s Community Exceptional
Circumstances policy from iterative perspectives of written material and the
common perspectives of actors and institutions who agreed to take part.
Authors have also described policy research methods as akin to a highly
tentative iterative problem solving process (Baehler, 2000; Bardach, 2000;
Smith & Robbins, 1982). Policy researchers have to contend with analysing
social values and the goals and assumptions that support public policy while
simultaneously understanding the effects of policy on society’s institutions,
budgets and outcomes. For these reasons Smith and Robbins (1982)
suggested that the best policy research often finds itself at the margins of
existing social science methodology: adapting, combining, iterating and
improvising on the methods as the research proceeds.This has certainly been
the case with my research as I explored alternative research tools.
The following is a presentation of possible methodological approaches and their
relevance to my research question.
I did not choose using feminist theory because there are no gender specific
constructs associated with PHARMAC’s decision making on the distribution of
pharmaceuticals. This is not to say that there are not specific classes of
medicines for women, men and other genders. Clearly there are. But decision
making about distributions of state funding for medicines is gender neutral. This
is required under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (1990). The only
discernable area of possible alignment with gender specific power differentials
is a possible bias towards the proportion of men appointed to PHARMAC’s
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