Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Qualitative research on health policy often uses key informant interviews as a method for data collection. In a study on national policy on global health in Switzerland and Norway, we introduced visual techniques of drawing on sketch-pads in 25 face-to-face interviews with senior level administrators and policy-makers in health, development and foreign policy sectors. When drawings are produced during interviews, abstract policy concepts are externalised onto paper in the form of images to which informants can react, reflecting on their experiences and commenting, comparing, or contradicting that visual representation. We informed participants about plans to use graphic methods in the recruitment process. We placed a sketchpad and pencils on the table at the start of each interview and explained that they could be used for mapping out activities and to visualise the processes and connections between them. Policy-makers interact with these techniques in a variety of ways. For discussion, diagraming works within a semi-structured interview to document and translate the policy process into an image to which the researcher or the informant can refer to later for more detail or for establishing relationships between parts of the sketch. For reflection, drawing engages informants in thinking about their participation in the policy process via a visual representation of their account. We analysed the visual data produced to visualise gaps in the data for subsequent rounds of interviews, to identify critical events, actors and contexts, and to construct a model of each country's policy arena. We aim to demonstrate how graphic methods in research on intersectoral policy processes go beyond the verbatim transcript by producing visual data with study participants to model their understandings of policy work with other sectors. While this research was conducted in Europe, we suggest visual methods are relevant for health policy research with decision-makers elsewhere.