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

This rationale led to the design of a second research phase in 1997, which was based in a school for the blind in Worcester, United Kingdom, and with teachers throughout the United Kingdom and United States. Subsequently, I designed a further, related postdoctoral phase of research in mixed groups of students, both blind and sighted, and in a blind programming community from 2005. In turn, this became a new model of research based on the conditions I observed as part of the original inquiry. I eventually evolved an approach over the course of this second phase that was based on a looser interpretation of Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) grounded theory coding strategies. This methodology included a set of data collection techniques married to interpretation procedures, which was chosen because its originators had found themselves in a similar position (i.e., researching a subject that had little or no meaningful social or cultural theory prior to their research), with few concepts to test using mainstream methodology.

The result of this reworked research on blindness as a cultural as well as a medical or perceptual impairment engaged the topic of the epistemology of blindness and led to the naming of this new approach the ‘epistemological model of the study of disability’, although this was shortened to the ‘epistemological model of disability’ in many of the texts I wrote later. This name highlights the fact that a number of studies of disability that employed traditional mechanisms and methodologies—including human geography, sociology, educational research, and ethnography—used elements of unquestioned classifications in the resulting scholarly works (Barton, 1997; Oliver, 1990, 1996). Furthermore, this model sees disabilities and impairments such as blindness in relation to other, broader social and cultural classifications. I defined categories of people according to the following: