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

terms of other groups of individuals beyond the specific group of individuals I worked with
(Blaxter, Hughes and Tight, 1998). I would contend that, having asked potential participants
to identify themselves within certain categories, what was important was to ensure
representation from each category. Having interviewed Charles and Lola I contacted the
remaining ten people and arranged interview dates with each of them between September
and November 2007.
Later on within the research process I added another five different participants for a number
of reasons.
Sukhbir failed to turn up for our first arranged interview in Birmingham in November 2007
and, over the course of a further series of emails identified himself as not particularly
interested in participating. As I wanted to ensure the inclusion of a BME perspective within
the range of accounts I was gathering, I invited Surinder, a disabled Asian woman I was
introduced to by Roshni.
The arbitrariness of the initial categories I had identified became even more apparent during
my first series of interviews. Some of those initially identified as positive were in some
aspects of their descriptions more negative than those who had identified themselves as
negative. Some of those identified as „just getting on with it‟ were similarly negative. In
some areas this worked the other way round, too, so that those who had initially identified as
negative were in areas of their discussions more positive about their experience than those
who had said otherwise; but overall it became apparent that a sense of negativity was fairly
general. Ironically, I was to end up snowballing in order to restore the balance of responses
in terms of positive input. Charles suggested I contact Mary and Lola suggested I contact
Brian as people who might have interesting input to make in this context.
It also became clear during the first series of interviews that I was talking with more middle-
aged than young disabled people. While I had not included age as a criterion for selection, I
discovered a bias in terms of the accounts I was collecting towards people in their forties and
fifties. As I transcribed these interviews I found myself wondering whether the same sorts of
views would be expressed by younger disabled people. I therefore invited Ali and Sarah to
participate. Both were in their early twenties at the time of the interviews. Ali is the son of a
friend of my wife‟s who, during a visit, had been talking about the difficult time her son was
going through in terms of self-acceptance since his recent diagnosis as having dyslexia. I
asked my wife‟s friend if she would approach her son about this. Sarah is a disabled student
at Queen Margaret University.
66