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

Because this study concerned a relatively new field of investigation and was designed as a nonpositivist investigation, the first choice I had to make for the coursework was about the nature of the data I was going to collect. After initially investigating and then rejecting potential modes of quantitative data following relatively informal visits to the studio and initial observations of the classes, I decided on a broad qualitative approach. This type of data collection was more efficient when seeking to create broad, previously ungrounded theory. It also offered the possibility of greater creativity in the analysis of its final data by allowing frequent revisions when building a theory based on initially arbitrary data. Furthermore, because this study was to be student centred, the style of data collection would allow the students and their lessons to be treated as individual case studies, which seemed to fit the small student body that was available in the studio.

My second choice was to employ four main data-gathering techniques during the first weeks and months of fieldwork: a literature search, interviews, taped reports, and observations. Each of my methods was chosen after a literature search in the fields of the history, practice, and psychological study of blind people’s education and was considered after discussions with practitioners in these fields. These then evolved through a consideration of the social and psychological factors that were not related to the research itself, such as the original reasons I chose to conduct this study and the potential emotional anxiety it could cause the people I involved in the research. All of these methodological strands are discussed in the following sections within the context of the research approach, the type of data collected, and the theory that initially underpinned these methods. The sections also describe my reflexive decision process during the course of the study, the problems that arose, and the engineering I produced to overcome them.

The third choice was the methodological focus. The initial social-philosophical approach to this was student-centred ethnomethodology. This was described by the British social researcher Creswell (1994) as