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

data, whatever the source, whether interview, observations, documents, in whatever combination. It is not only what is being told, how it is being told and the conditions of its being told, but also all the data surrounding what is being told. It means what is going on must be figured out exactly what it is to be used for, that is conceptualization, not for accurate description. Data is always as good as far as it goes, and there is always more data to keep correcting the categories with more relevant properties. (Glaser, 2001, p. 145)

This notion also led to a belief that a research study should not be seen within the paradigm of strictly qualitative or quantitative research, although it was emphasised in the original literature that grounded theory was seen as primarily a qualitative methodology, with quantitative data playing more of a comparative role. It was argued that both forms, such as tabular data, could be blended according to the context in which they were being applied. Similarly, Glaser and Strauss argued that existing theories and data collected through primary studies were also alike, and hence studies in refereed journals could be compared with data that were freshly collected during fieldwork on the same terms.

Their second notion was that grounded theory was essentially the pursuit of a controllable methodology whilst at the same time being antistructuralist, although this approach stopped short of taking the views of extreme anti-empiricists such as the Austrian Feyerabend (2010). In The Discovery of Grounded Theory, for instance, Glaser and Strauss argued that theories are man-made and evolve in a state of flux through the context of the environment that is being studied. Similarly, they contended that research should not be regarded as hierarchical and that all researchers’ experiences were valuable, as long as they had been collected using objective strategies.

Perhaps the easiest way in which to interpret Glaser and Strauss’s initial treatment of fieldwork and analysis is to see it like writing an everlasting play, breaking their theoretical development into three distinct phases of cyclical coding, as described in their original literature (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The sampling of the participants within this process is