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

I included this last category because it became clear my initial divisions had been very
arbitrary and the information I received suggested it was fairly usual for people to shift
between feeling positive and negative about themselves in terms of disability experience. As
John Storey notes:
65
Just as texts are marked by multiple discourses, so are [individuals]. Subjectivity is
not something fixed and unchanging, it is always on the move, constantly being
addressed by, and always taking up, a range of different subject positions (Storey,
2003:69).
I need to add that my reasons for selecting some rather than others were not because the ones
I selected seemed better or to have more that was interesting or valuable to say about
themselves than those I did not. My aim was, rather, to gather what seemed to me to be as
diverse a range of voices on the subject as possible. In making decisions on who I would
invite to participate I had to rely, principally, on my own instinct and feel for the area
(Esterberg, 2002). I have included in Appendix B extracts from a number of examples of the
types of responses I received. As will be the case throughout my thesis, unless people have
asked that I use their real names, all personal names are disguised.
By early September I had narrowed down my choices to twelve people, including Charles
and Lola (with whom I had carried out first interviews in August while they were in
Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival). These twelve were: Charles and Lola (from the field of
disability arts); Ben and Roshni (categorised as identifying positively as disabled); Anne,
Hazel, Sukhbir and Jennie (categorised as just getting on with it); Rose and Kevin
(categorised as identifying negatively); and Helen and Ash (categorised as a bit of all three).
I do not claim that these twelve were chosen scientifically or in a way that reflected more
than approximately the quantitative spread of responses.
I had to work intuitively with a sense of what I was looking for, hoping that insight would
emerge from the people I had chosen to interview. It could be argued that, while undoubtedly
different in terms of specifics from the data I produced, it would likely have been the case
that I would have emerged with data as interesting had I selected a different twelve people.
As it was, two people I invited to become participants did not respond to my further emails
and so two of the people I actually interviewed were originally second choices. I do not,
however, think the data I might have produced with the people who did not respond would
have been any better or that the data produced is any less valuable. What is important is the
generalisability of my research, or the question of whether my findings have relevance in