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

I have described participants‟ ages in order to indicate the age range covered by the people
involved in my research. Given a difference of around thirty years between the ages of the
oldest and youngest participants, particularly when it is considered that this covers a period
where significant changes have been made in terms of life opportunities for disabled people,
I have found the similarity of perspectives revealing. I talk about this at greater length
during my discussion on disability as role.
The interview guide
Following the outline given in Lofland et al. (2006:104) I developed an interview guide to
ensure that a number of key ethical issues (e.g. informed consent, confidentiality, ownership
and accountability) were discussed and clarified between myself and participants prior to the
commencement of their involvement in my research. Before the start of each first interview I
went through the interview guide step-by-step, outlining and clarifying each point to ensure
that participants were aware of what they were committing themselves to. I obtained each
participant‟s signature as authorisation to go ahead in recording our discussions and using
these as data for my research.
I have included a copy of my interview guide as Appendix C.
Three stages of data collection
In order to explore my question from a range of perspectives, I triangulated my research by
adopting three different research strategies. As Kristin Esterberg points out
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...in-depth interviews can provide insight into people‟s thoughts and feelings, but
people‟s behaviours don‟t always match their words. Analyses of texts can tell you
about social ideals for behaviour, but the texts can‟t tell you how people actually
respond to them (Esterberg, 2002:36).
I wanted to learn about not only what people feel about being disabled, and about ways in
which they have come to think about and make sense of disability, but to see what I could
discover about their responses to everyday experiences in a disabling society. I wanted to
record not only considered discussion about their personal histories and about media
representations of disability, but to try and capture their immediate reactions to experiences
of being subjected to disabling barriers.
The three different research strategies involved two in-depth interviews, one semi-structured
and one unstructured, and a form of participant observation, or Go-Along research