Master_thesis

their positions, values, and beliefs provide a valuable source of data (Holsti, 1969;
Krippendorf, 1980). Documents, where the same individual or representative repeats
expression of policy beliefs over time foster retrospective content analysis. Records of
Congressional hearings are also examples of public documents which contain formal,
informal and interrogatory expressions by individuals extensively involved in attempts to
shape a given policy debate (King, 1989). By content analysis, primary data sets can be
obtained.
In ACF, to capture expressed beliefs, interests, and policy positions of the governmental and
interest-group documents, the use of content analysis involves three steps: (1) the
identification of the target population and a representative sampling of that population to be
coded; (2) the development of a coding frame consisting of the relevant elements in the
belief systems of the target population; and (3) attention to reliability and validity problems
when inferring beliefs from documentary sources (Sabatier, 1993). Identifying the target
population can be accomplished easily by referring to the policy subsystem or set of policy
actors. However, developing a coding frame is an arduous task because it requires the
researcher to have a thorough understanding of the issues that arose and major positions
taken through out the period under study. Aside from that, coding frames typically go
through several iterations as their preliminary applications to the material under
investigation repeatedly uncover new ideas or positions that merit inclusion or refinement
(Sabatier 1993). The codeforms developed by Jenkins-Smith, H. & G. St. Claire in the U.S.
Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) project (Jenkins-Smith, et.al, 1993) and Sabatier in
Environmental Policy at Lake Tahoe, 1964-1985 project (Sabatier, 1993) took
approximately a year to develop code frames alone and suffered numerous revisions in the
process of being fleshed out and refined (Sabatier, 1993). For this reason, the methodology
for this study was modified due to time limitation in the collection of data and data analysis.
3.3 Conceptual Analysis
In order to capture the beliefs of the policy actors from the collected data, instead of the
development of coding frames for counting and recording procedures, conceptual analysis
was used. Conceptual analysis is one of the major types of content analysis. As the word
itself, a ‘concept’ is chosen for examination whereas ‘analysis’ involves quantifying and
tallying its presence. The main focus of conceptual analysis is to look at the occurrence of
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