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

nonparticipant observation and interviewing of students in the Leicester studio during classes. I then added the individual, personal reporting of exercises by the participating students through diaries and participant observations, the latter of which became a practical option at times when I could stand alone in the studio. Although the order of observations was subjectively perceived, I discovered that it was particularly advantageous because it allowed for an element of standardization and objectification of the data as it occurred, and so it became the foremost method. This also came after my initial finding when I first entered the studio at Leicester University, that watching students allowed insights into their other social activities outside the realm of the class and sometimes in contradiction of the publicity material that was circulated by the centre, allowing me to rely less on the filter of intermediaries such as lecturers’ and administrators’ opinions. A similar point was raised by the British educationalist Bell (1993) when juxtaposing the problems of relying on interviews alone. Of this, she wrote,

Once mastered, [interviewing] is a technique that can often reveal characteristics of groups or individuals which would have been impossible to discover by other means. Interviews … point out, provide important data, but they reveal only how people perceive what happens. Direct observation may be more reliable than what people say in many instances. (p. 92)

Consequently, I decided to use interviewing after observations to record student histories, to verify what I had observed and to gather the students’ opinions on the course they were following. In this study, this approach was especially useful because there were few written records accessible and those that were were diffuse and gave only patchy, one-dimensional sketches of students’ prior education and personal histories (these were such things as exam assessments and school reports). Thus, interviewing provided an opportunity to explore students’ memories relating to specific experiences. In addition, I decided that later interview questions would be informed by the verbal reports that were created by several students on issues they believed were important to their personal