Multimethod research into policy changes in the pharmacy sector--the Nordic case

This article aims to explain the nature of multimethod studies and to illustrate their role in pharmaceutical policy research. In the field of pharmaceutical policy research, methodological and theoretically sound evaluation is the main goal. Reflexive learning is required in order to address and resolve one of the important paradoxes of late modern societies, which is that while the increasing complexity of social systems progressively undermines notions of certainty in social knowledge, it simultaneously raises the stakes in relation to rational guidance of those systems. By reflecting over our own research processes, we identified the strengths and weaknesses of multimethod research. We present our research methods and the experiences of pharmaceutical policy changes from two separate evaluation studies, one from Iceland and the other from Denmark. In addition, examples from a third study in progress are included: a multimethod international comparison of recent changes in pharmaceutical policy in Iceland, Denmark and Norway. Based on our experiences and reflections, we identified four of the most important issues we encountered in carrying them out: The importance of doing research in context; Challenges of comparison and questions of compatibility of data--both qualitative and quantitative; The importance of doing these studies with a multidisciplinary team; Research in pharmaceutical policy is a fluid, ongoing process.