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

and artistic development, and which related to their present exercises and past experiences.

Observations

The type of observation was an important choice. Of the available options, I initially chose nonparticipant observations of different student groups in different lessons, and I intended to remain with this style for the whole of the study. Cohen and Manion (1994) argued that this method was one that was more impartial than nonparticipant studies, because the researcher is a dispassionate spectator on the outside of the social phenomena being studied, rather like an operative conducting a time-and-motion study. Thus, I decided at the outset to take a position in class away from the students, sitting on a stool or chair near the corner or edges of the room, and to develop a qualitative coding method to record what I saw. As Cohen and Manion described in their text,

[Nonparticipant] observers…stand aloof from the group activities they are investigating and eschew group membership…. The best illustration of the non-participant observer role is perhaps the case of the researcher sitting at the back of a classroom coding up every three seconds the verbal exchanges between teacher and pupils by means of a structured set of observational categories. (p. 107)

There were initially two factors that influenced this choice of observation. The first was my social separation from the participants, which as a first step seemed particularly favourable because I was new to this type of social environment and would take time to develop an idea of what was going on around me. Hence, as I sat away from the students and instructors, I was able to record all of the actions and interactions in real time using a pen-and-paper narratives. I chose this form of media because I believed it was unethical to videotape participants who would not be able to view the tape for themselves. And, I found that it was