Policy Analysis and Document-Based Literacy Research LISA PATEL STEVENS AND MATTHEW LALIBERTE In Lisa Patel Stevens’s undergraduate training as a print journalist, a professor handed her the journalistic charge succinctly: A newspaper should convey what it was like to be alive on that day in that place. Fairly straightforward, right? However, even a cursory scratch of the surface of that statement agitates and enlivens the complexity that spills over the capacity of texts to capture lived realities neutrally. For example, depending upon the news source, the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster of climate patterns or a human-made disaster of civil engineering. Also depending upon your lived experiences, the reporting of these events may be, in and of themselves, textual acts that perpetuate racial inequities in the United States. It is within this complexity of texts as representative and agentive that policy analyses and document-based literacy research finds itself. Literacy research has been informed by various approaches and methodologies. With sociocultural views of literacy strengthening in the late 20th century, these perspectives also influenced the ways in which literacy practices were researched, the ways in which researchers examined, and the ways in which they conveyed findings of these examina- tions. As observation of literacy practices and interviews about these practices took strong hold as methods of literacy research in authentic settings, so did analysis of policies and documents that shaped and addressed literacy practices. At the heart of archival and policy analysis is a positioning of text and language as key sources of containers and shapers of material and figurative worlds. Texts are in constant dialogical relationships with participants and contexts, both enacted by and enacting mean- ings. A focus upon language as a source of meaning both thickened and was complicated by the advent of explorations of the structure of language (Saussure, 2006) and then the poststructural ellipse between language and meaning (e.g., Foucault, 1972). Increasingly, the role of language in the interplay of individuals, institutions, and society has solidified as one of the most frequently researched sources of knowledge. Situated within the field of applied linguistics and the larger transdisciplinary theories of semiotics, policy, and archival analyses are methodological approaches to investigating the ways in which literacy beliefs, practices, and competencies are in dialectical conversation with texts. Textually Based Research: The Elision of Text and Meaning Archival and policy texts, like any other texts, are representations, and by that definition, are partial and incomplete. As partial and incomplete representations, they are always contested, and at many levels. It is thus critical to consider the perspectival act of convey- ing and constructing meaning. Take, for instance, the following definitions of policy, which is one type of text: [Policy is] the expressed intentions of government actors relative to a public problem and the activities related to those intentions. (Dubnick & Bardes, 1983, p. 8) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0915