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

populations (Atkinson and Flint, 2001). Atkinson and Flint have defined snowball sampling
as a technique for finding research subjects involving:
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one subject (who) gives the researcher the name of another subject, who in turn
provides the name of a third, and so on (Atkinson and Flint, 2001:unpaged).
It was my intention, had it proved hard to contact disabled people who regarded impairment
negatively, to involve other participants in identifying these, asking if they knew of people
who might be approached directly or indirectly in relation to this. There turned out to be no
need as I received responses from people in all three of the identified categories. I received
an offer of assistance in this matter from a disabled worker in one of the large national
charities who said they would be happy to approach their own disabled members. Accessing
people from the last group was, I am sure, helped by people unknown to me who distributed
my letter through their own organisations. This meant that my letter was seen by people who
would never go near the website of a political campaigning organisation, but who had
contact with impairment-specific charities.
By the time my letter had been in the public domain for a fortnight I had received 72
enquiries (by email and telephone) from people interested in becoming research participants.
This meant I was faced with a problem very different – and far preferable – to the one I had
anticipated. My problem now became one of narrowing down the potential list. In order to
do this I asked people to get back in touch, sending a short pen picture. Some people had
already given me brief details about themselves in their initial contacts, which I found gave
me a clearer basis upon which to make a decision. Most people got back to me with pen
pictures. Those who had not responded by the end of August I did not include for further
consideration. I made the judgement that if I had people from all three positions with whom
communication was going to be relatively straightforward there was little point in chasing up
people with whom it was not.
I established four categories of people in terms of responses and information I had been
given:
Really positive
Just getting on with it
Identify negatively
A bit of all three