Developing Causal Map Codebooks to Analyze Policy Recommendations: A preliminary content analysis of floodplain management recommendations following the 1993 Midwest Floods

摘要

In July 2008, a congressional hearing was held to better understand the damages incurred during the Midwest Floods of 2008. In March 2009, the Army Corps of Engineers responded to a request made by Senator Boxer, who asked the Corps to report back on the status of the 97 recommendations made in Sharing the Challenge (1994). The codebook for analyzing recommendations helps answer a fundamental question asked by scholars and practitioners in policy analysis: Which recommendations are most likely to be implemented?Policy recommendations in public policy venues provide a course of action by framing issues in ways that lead decision-makers to preferred solutions. This paper presents a codebook for developing causal maps of policy recommendations. The codebook's strengths and weaknesses are discussed as it is applied to a set of recommendations that were made to improve floodplain management in the U.S. By developing codebooks that are reliable, consistent, and transparent, the internal validity of causal maps constructed from qualitative data will improve substantially.