Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

332 ANALYZING DATA

are open minds and a capacity to articulate the grounds for choosing a method and to describe

how it is applied to gather, analyze, and interpret data.

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In the 1980s the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) produced wilderness environmen-

tal impact statements (EISs) that evaluated 855 areas, comprising 24 million acres of

public land, and recommended for or against wilderness designation of these areas....

An examination of arguments in the BLM wilderness EISs reveals the structure of stories

about wilderness designation. It shows how BLM personnel joined technical analyses to

recommendations through conflicting arguments about wilderness designation....

Analyzing how arguments connect technical information with political recommendations

provides a useful way to examine how agencies bring together technical analyses and

political positions to frame issues.

—Clare Ginger (2000, 292–93; 307–8)

In 1988, I began my dissertation research focusing on the implementation of wilderness policy in

the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). I used ethnographic methods and became a participant-

observer in agency offices in Washington, D.C., Utah, and Arizona for sixteen months, distributed

over five summers, in the role of student intern. As a part of this project, I analyzed a set of

wilderness environmental impact statements (EISs) using interpretive methods to assess their

structure and content for stories and arguments. I drew on an understanding of writing as an

activity through which we convey meaning by choosing, organizing, and describing content at

various levels: in report structure, paragraph and sentence construction, and word choices. My

approach provided an avenue for understanding how the EISs served as an arena for agency

personnel to tell stories and make arguments about wilderness policy through technical analysis.

In describing my analytical approach in this chapter, I illustrate one avenue for assessing techni-

cal documents to understand how they frame policy issues. I begin with background information

about the policy context of the wilderness EISs, define some terms, and, finally, describe some of

the methods I used to analyze these documents.

This assessment reveals some of the ways that politics enter technical analyses. I show how

implementing structural uniformity in documents can affect the information contained in EISs,

and how this uniformity brought coherence to the agency’s story about wilderness despite varia-

tion across field offices and local politics. The analysis provides a way to assess a change in

public lands policy: the incorporation of wilderness policy, which is meant to protect land from

commodity development, into an agency that historically has promoted commodity develop-

ment. I also detail how to analyze arguments to understand how it is possible for people to use the

same scenarios to draw opposite conclusions.

POLICY CONTEXT FOR THE BLM WILDERNESS EISS

The BLM manages over 260 million acres of public land in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colo-

rado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming for re-

sources that include minerals, oil and gas, range (livestock grazing), timber, recreation, cultural

elements, wildlife, and wilderness. The agency is organized as a geographically nested hierarchy

with offices at four levels: Washington, D.C.; states; districts; and resource areas. Within each of