ABSTRACT
Planning research often draws on a range of documents produced in practice – policies, discussion papers, records of planning decisions, planning committee minutes, promotional materials, media and other statements associated with political debates about urban and regional development. This chapter looks at three different approaches to understanding and interpreting such materials: content analysis, storyline analysis and critical discourse analysis. In addition to some basic ‘how-to’ instruction, the chapter contrasts such analytical methods with other research tasks involving texts, such as the scholarly literature review and the desktop study, and shows how each is suited to somewhat different research concerns and orientations.
