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

impractical to use audiotape in the studio, particularly using my small Dictaphone, because it did not cover a wide enough area, particularly when the students moved around from one task to another.

The second factor influencing my choice was that I had no previous research experience in this field of education. My background at the time was open and distance learning, and my experience of disabled people was having a father who was latterly blind and used a wheelchair and having a number of maternal family members who were affected by a hearing impairment. I had never previously worked with a large community of disabled adults and did not understand their educational, social, and physical needs in comparison to those of adults in other studios I had attended. As a model, I used Bell’s (1993) description of a small-scale study with individual observers where no initial theory work was available or where there were a number of observers to discuss observations from similar classrooms, as larger-scale studies allowed. As she wrote at the time,

In 100 hour projects, it would be unwise to undertake unstructured observation unless you are already experienced and are very familiar with the techniques involved. In order to derive worthwhile information from the data, you will probably need to adopt a more structured approach and to devise some form of recording in order to identify aspects of behavior which you have identified before-hand as being of likely relevance to the research. (p. 111)

After choosing my observational approach, I had to decide upon the nature and structure of the initial observational data. Because I was so separate from the participants, the data I recorded could be based on theoretical constructions grounded in categories of behaviours and interactions defined in the course of the fieldwork. This was particularly valuable because the first lessons I attended were meant to be only the initial steps in the study—a set of pilot observations—and I hoped that I could more thoroughly reinvestigate the classes later on in the term, using predefined categories derived from these initial records.