Qualitative Research: Introduction

Since the 1990s on, we have witnessed an explosion of disability qualitative research, recently boosted by the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its call for participation of persons with disabilities in all spheres of life, including research (Flynn et al., Qualitative Research, 21(2), 234–250, 2020; Johnson, British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 37, 250–256, 2009). Qualitative researchers use a variety of methods to develop deep understandings of how people perceive their social realities and, in consequence, how they act within the social world. From diaries to open-ended questionnaires, from visual documents to participant observation and ethnography, these tools and methods enable rich accounts of the lived experiences of research participants, always complex and multidimensional, in ways that quantitative approaches can never do. This is the reason they are well suited to disability research. The aim of this section is to outline and discuss the epistemological, methodological, ethical, and practical issues that arise from doing qualitative research with persons with disabilities, in a variety of contexts, particularly those who are not part of the majority. In this introduction, after briefly presenting past and current debates on qualitative critical disability methodologies, we present the five chapters that compose this section.