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

testable concepts on this issue. In my initial readings, a similar point was stressed by the Australian social scientists Hitchcock and Hughes (1989), who wrote,

We have found from experience that there is a positive advantage in developing data collection and analysis side by side as it enables one to try out different explanations of the fit between data and the theory as one proceeds. (p. 97)

In addition to its openness, the choice of ethnomethodology had the advantage of being more favourable to the antipositivist style of research that I chose in this early stage. This attitude again enhanced an understanding that the researcher could have a degree of subjectivity in his or her data collection and could move away from an approach that tended to see a world of rigid forms of empirical understandings of social phenomena discovered through scientific investigations. This also allowed the study of research participants as individuals rather than whole society expressions, affording a more humanistic presentation. Again, this fitted the overall ethical framework that I was designing in conjunction with the fieldwork. As a model of description, during the later stages of this fieldwork I turned to the British social scientists Cohen and Manion (1994), who delineated the choices between these two radically different stances. As they wrote at the time,

Investigators adopting an objectivist (or positivist) approach to the social world and who treat it like the world of natural phenomena as being hard, real and external to the individual will choose from a range of traditional options—surveys[,] experiments and the like. Others favoring the more subjectivist (or anti-positivist) approach and who view the social world as being of a much softer, personal and humanly-created kind will select from a comparable range of recent and emerging techniques—accounts, participant observation and personal constructs for example. (p. 7)

The fourth choice I made was about the order of data collection methodology during the fieldwork. The research initially focused on the