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

Indeed confusingly, already the title of Glaser and Strauss’ initial work, ‘The Discovery of Grounded Theory’, implies that there is a theory out there standing on neutral ground ‘ready to be discovered’, (and which will ‘emerge’ from the data). Thomas and James [(2006)] go very much into detail criticizing that a) ‘there is no untethered spirit in the minds of researchers which will enable them neutrally and inertly to lay some cognitive framework over the data they collect to allow them to draw “theory” dispassionately from this data, this ground; b) grounded theories just like notions and dreams are products of cultured minds. Unlike for instance the moons of Jupiter, these products are not discovered, but invented; and c) the emergence of grounded theory is after all constructed or invented based on the researcher’s interpretation and cognition. (Calin & Weiss, 2011, pp. 3–4)

The controversy that surrounded grounded theory as I considered its philosophies during my research methodology design led me to reinterpret its use as a nonclassical, more informal methodology and to redesign it to fit my particular needs of data collection, whilst at the same time keeping its basic structure of the three phases of cyclical data interpretation. Thus, in order to avoid conflict with more orthodox methodologists, I decided to refer to this concept as grounded methodology instead. Over time, this led me to raise the following questions relating to the design of the methodology:

1. Was Glaser and Strauss’s discovery of grounded research relevant to this study?

2. Are the criticisms of the philosophy of the grounded theory justified?

In order to address these, what follows in this book is a discussion of the fieldwork that evolved from the notion of grounded methodology, the data that were collected and analysed during the course of the fieldwork, and the ethical considerations I had to address whilst designing the methodology. In doing this, I have broken its description into the following four sections and seven chapters, as follows.