ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to Part 1 of this book, focusing on different forms of and approaches to document and text analysis taken within critical education policy research. Research on education policy often works with documentary sources, from ‘official’ policy documents themselves to other kinds of texts, including mainstream media texts, websites and social media. This chapter provides an overview and mapping of different approaches to incorporating document and text analysis into policy research and argues for why policy texts ‘matter’. This chapter also functions as a further introduction to the chapters included in Part 1, which focus on critical discourse analysis, Foucauldian approaches, Indigenist Policy Analysis, media analysis, analysis of websites and promotional material, and social media and network analysis.
