This new textbook opens up the policy-making process for students, uncovering how government decisions around health are really made. Starting from more traditional insights into how ministers and civil servants develop policy with limited knowledge and money, the book goes on to challenge the conception of policy as a rational process, revealing it to be something quite different.

Knee-jerk reactions to disasters, keeping voters satisfied, the powerful leverage of interest groups, and the skewing of debate through ideology and the media are each considered in turn. These...

This new textbook opens up the policy-making process for students, uncovering how government decisions around health are really made. Starting from more traditional insights into how ministers and civil servants develop policy with limited knowledge and money, the book goes on to challenge the conception of policy as a rational process, revealing it to be something quite different.

Knee-jerk reactions to disasters, keeping voters satisfied, the powerful leverage of interest groups, and the skewing of debate through ideology and the media are each considered in turn. These...

The book has no competitor; it summarises the development of the method, follows through all stages of research from accessing subjects through design to analysing diary information as data, and considers how the method can best be exploited and used. No other book comes remotely near doing this. I for one shall be using it gratefully as the single best text for diary research' - Professor Anthony P Macmillan Coxon, Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh

In this accessible and lucid introductory text, Andy Alaszewski considers the analysis of...