208 ANALYZING DATA
provisional—analytic steps take place while one is immersing oneself in learning about the issue,
as well as afterward when one is engaged in more directed analysis.
Schmidt’s approach is also an excellent example of the ways in which interpretive analyses
that begin with an examination of the minutiae of daily life often end up seeing these as elements
in a drama, or a narrative, of identity issues on a much broader scale. He initially thought of his
study of U.S. language policy debates as being contestations over facts, but soon came to see
them as disputes about issues of national and group identity. Similarly, Kristin Luker, in her study
of abortion policy conflicts (1984), found the contestation to be less about childbearing itself and
more about “lifestyle” questions of the two camps and their visions of adult female identity; and
Joseph Gusfield, analyzing the temperance movement (1963), found it a symbolic battle between
members of the then-ascendant socioeconomic class and the values and lifestyle they imputed to
groups of immigrants who were, they felt, challenging that power and status.^4 It is not yet clear
whether seeing the broader scope of human activity enacted in case specifics is an attribute of all
interpretive policy studies, of interpretive political analyses more broadly, or of all interpretive
work, and not only of those studies that treat the fact-value dichotomy, as Martin Rein’s (1976)
value-critical approach was intended to do. It is a point of methodological investigation worth
asking in reading across a variety of subfields and disciplines.
In conceptualizing interview talk as an opportunity to elicit and hear “stories,” Steven Maynard-
Moody and Michael Musheno (chapter 18) argue that storytellers experience a partial reliving of
their experiences, resulting in less self-monitoring than is normally the case with face-to-face
interviews. Such an approach is essential for understanding the views of frontline workers—the
cops, teachers, and counselors of their study—because these individuals’ views are often sub-
jugated to those of elites at the top of hierarchical, organizational, and policy worlds.
To make sure that they were not projecting their own theoretical preconceptions and categories
onto the workers, Maynard-Moody and Musheno took great pains to elicit the day-to-day language
and experiences of these government workers in the form of workers’ own stories; and they went
back to storytellers with their transcriptions at least once to make sure that they (the researchers)
were not, so to speak, putting words in the workers’ mouths. Their analytic method can be usefully
summarized as a “close reading” or even a “close listening” of how these workers understand their
worlds. And, indeed, workers did not understand themselves and their workplace decisions in terms
of the categories accepted by policy leaders and academic researchers. Analytical recognition of
these silences, a common concern of much interpretive research, is explicated in the chapter.
At the other end of the spectrum of data sources and genres, one hardly expects planning
documents to share any of the narrative or rhetorical characteristics that are part of our image of
“stories.” In chapter 19, Clare Ginger’s analysis of Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) shows
us otherwise. Using the literary conventions of plot, subplot, and main and supporting characters,
she demonstrates how framing and reframing of the reports’ arguments were accomplished in a
shift from draft EISs to the final versions. In some draft EISs the effects of designating an area a
“wilderness” highlighted impacts on agency operations, whereas the final EISs attended to antici-
pated impacts on communities, a seemingly subtle shift but one with significant political implica-
tions for local interest group struggles over federal policy. As significant, Ginger ferrets out the
unstated normative assumptions embedded in supposedly apolitical documents and analyses,
demonstrating the contrast with “official prescriptions and attitudes [that] emphasize the neutral-
ity and pure calculativeness of the planning texts” (Summa 1992, 144). In sum, she provides
analytic means for taking on the presumed “objectivity” of expert analyses—a topic of growing
relevance given the increasing reach of rationalizing state power (see, e.g., the argument in J.C.
Scott 1998).