METHODS OF THE SECOND TYPE: COPING WITH THE WILDERNESS OF CONVENTIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS

Policy analysts, like allegorical homesteaders, face the seemingly unmanageable task of coping with the wilderness of ill-structured problems, while concurrently attending to well-structured problems, which can be addressed with conventional methods of policy analysis. What has appeared thus far as an unmanageable task may become manageable once analysts acknowledge the principle of methodological congruence: The appropriateness of a particular type of method is a function of its congruence with the type of problem under investigation. Copyright 1988 by The Policy Studies Organization.