Political Science

The two policies that would be discussed and analyzed are from the online references from the US Department of Health Website. Identifying one policys dimension would assist any reader for clearer comprehension on the presented documents. The two policies that are used for examples are the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) Policy on Informing Those Tested About HIV Serostatus and Federal Policy (Common Rule) for the Protection of Human Subjects. This paper will try to find if classifying policies into varying dimensions would truly help on executing policy analysis.

The U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) Policy on Informing Those Tested About HIV Serostatus policy falls under the procedural, regulatory, and collective categories. It is considered procedural as it not only discusses the mandatory action required once the test results were released but also a step-by-step process to be followed by the IRB (Institutional Review Boards) representatives. Its policy also discussed the exemptions to be made when the HIV positive individual is proven mentally incapable or unstable. It is under the regulatory dimension as again, since medical result information and counseling is deemed necessary, to compel these patients to be in their best behavior (stop having unprotected sexual intercourse etc). Finally, it is considered as a collective policy as adhering strictly to this would lessen the probability of HIV getting infected from the innocent bystanders.

The Federal Policy (Common Rule) for the Protection of Human Subjects, however, is classified differently from the former. While the HIV policy is under the procedural category, the Human Subjects policy is in substantive category. The reason for doing so is that the policy talked about the rights of the different kinds of human subjects. These are also a distributive and a private goods type seeing that this police would only benefit for this said sector. The only aspect that the two policies seem to share is that both are under the material policy category. Both policies provide tangible resources for their targeted sectors. The AIDS policy gives accurate counseling for the HIV-positive individuals while the latter ensure that the human subjects individuals would be given protection and confidentiality.

After careful evaluation, it is safe to assure that another researcher for these mentioned policies will arrive with the same conclusion. Classification of policy dimension, if done with scrutiny, would greatly help in the political analysis. Evaluating these two policies is one good exercise especially for the aspiring researchers for policy analysis.