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

events for disabled peoples‟ organisations and had also seen him perform at a number of
disability arts events. I had first met Lola through a disabled colleague from London who
had told me about her short stories.
I was seeking to identify between ten and twelve participants, each of whom I intended to
meet across a series of data gathering sessions (outlined below). Having identified two
disabled artists I wanted to identify the remainder of my participants from the wider disabled
community. On 17 July 2007 my letter asking for participants to take part in my research
was published as an e-bulletin by Inclusion Scotland, the national campaigning organisation
of disabled people.
In this letter (Appendix A) I introduced myself as a disabled PhD researcher at Queen
Margaret University, Edinburgh, looking for 10-12 disabled people anywhere in Britain who
would be interested in taking part in a series of interviews on disability identity. I stated that
this would involve talking about ways that people think about themselves, experiences that
have led them to think the way they do, and messages about being disabled they have been
given as members of families, communities, society.
I explained in the letter that I would like to involve:
62
People who had really strong and positive disability identities, maybe activists
involved in campaigning in the disabled people‟s movement
People for whom being disabled is just a fact of life, something to get on with, but
not really something to go on about;
People who really hate being disabled and who can‟t see anything good in the
experience
The selection of these three different categories of people was strategically intended to
reduce the possibility of error and bias in the data I would collect (Lofland et al. 2006:93).
By seeking to involve as research participants people coming from different positions in
relation to the experience of disability, I aimed to avoid repetition of the same sorts of
perspectives. Where validity is a euphemism for „the truth‟ (Rodriguez and Ryave, 2002:22),
I considered it likely I would capture a more valid picture of the experience of disability with
a broader range of outlooks. It would have been very easy to argue in support of the
affirmative model if all the disabled people I interviewed were upbeat about their personal