Grounded Theory and Disability Studies: An Investigation Into Leg ...

investigations through which data are gathered about a whole, identifiable community, one that is either held together through an abstract relationship, such as an identifiable ethnic or disabled community, or in which the group is linked through an environment, such as a college class or an institutional work area. Creswell argued that research with these groups, unlike highly empirical studies, had to be reflexive, flexible, and changeable according to the social, cultural, and environmental contexts in which the researcher found himself or herself. Thus, the data gathered, be they audio recordings, written notes, or photographic records, also needed to be able to change and evolve with the fieldwork. This form of research was then further refined to critical ethnography, an approach I believed to be especially useful to this form of study because it involved the analysis of behaviour in the context of specific policy as an attempt to appraise its worth and value. As Creswell (1994) stated on this method,

In this approach the researcher chooses between the conceptual alternatives and value-laden judgments to challenge research, policy and other forms of human activity. Critical ethnographers attempt to aid emancipatory goals, negate repressive influences, raise consciousness, and invoke a call to action that potentially will lead to social change. (p. 12)

As the fieldwork evolved further, I found that this approach also fitted the ethical policy I was constructing to help with the development of the data collection. Unlike more rigid experimental methodologies, it did not assume any previous conceptual awareness of the issues that were being studied. This was particularly useful because no previous studies dealing with precisely the same student group in the same educational settings were apparent in my initial literature search. I also discovered that a number of other writers on research methodology had argued that starting a research project with a predetermined theory can hinder its evolution. Eventually, this decision was precipitous, because this decision meant that I was designing a study that could easily evolve into a grounded methodology, with the first phase being used to develop