Social Sciences Methods in Global Health Policy Research

Health policy operates inside networks of institutions, interests, and informal understandings that epidemiological or economic analysis alone cannot capture. This note surveys methodological approaches from sociology, anthropology, and political science that illuminate how policies form, persist, and change: ethnographic observation of implementation sites, institutional analysis of rule-making, network mapping of stakeholder relationships, and qualitative interview evidence of decision-maker reasoning. These methods reveal slippages between formal policy and lived practice, hidden costs of interventions, and why technically sound policies sometimes fail.