A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

(Moore, Beazley and Maelzer, 1998).
My opening chapter involves a discussion and evaluation of existing literature as it relates to
my thesis. My second chapter considers disability identity and includes a personal account of
my own experience in relation to this. In my third chapter I describe the research process. In
chapters four and five I discuss themes arising from the first series of interviews on
participants‟ subject positioning. Chapter six considers participants‟ reflections on media
representations as resources for making sense of the disability experience. In my final
chapter I describe and analyse observations I made of participants‟ engagement in the midst
of everyday life. I finish with a short conclusion.
My clarified affirmative model definitions are grounded within and emerge from my analysis
of participants‟ accounts of their own experiences. At the present time there have been no
major research projects engaging with the affirmative model, which remains a tentative
proposition rather than a tested hypothesis. It is in the clarification and evaluation of the
affirmative model that I aim to have made an original contribution to knowledge.
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