EDUCATION OF DISABLED CHILDREN: SYNCHRONISING HUMAN RIGHTS NORMS WITH EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 

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CHAPTER THREE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND DESIGN

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I discuss the overall research methodology and design, including the data collection instruments, the data analysis methods and the quality and ethical considerations in greater detail.

RESEARCH APPROACH AND DESIGN

Qualitative research approach

The overall research approach chosen for this study is the qualitative approach, which is an approach that allows representing any given reality from a range of different perspectives – opening up “the possibility of multiple, valid descriptions of the same phenomenon” (Gerrish 2003:82).
In addition to reiterating the political nature of qualitative research, hence “shaped by multiple ethical and political positions”, Denzin and Lincoln (2011:6) define qualitative research as an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counterdisciplinary field. It crosscuts the humanities, as well as the social and physical sciences. It is multi-paradigmatic in focus, and its practitioners are sensitive to the value of the multimethod approach.
As law and policy research aims at unravelling the complexity underlying law- and policy-making processes, the qualitative research approach would be a suitable choice for such research and thus for this specific study (Taylor et al. 1997:40). Qualitative research embraces broad, interpretive, post-experimental, postmodern, feminist, and critical approaches as well as more narrowly defined positivist, postpositivist, humanistic, and naturalistic conceptions of human experience (Denzin & Lincoln 2011:6). Such a research approach also seeks to address “questions that stress how social experience is created and given meaning” (Denzin & Lincoln 2011:8).
There are many qualitative research designs, including grounded theory, phenomenology, case study, ethnography and narrative analysis. One of these research designs, the generic or non-categorical research design, has gained ground over the past decade (Lichtman 2010:87). It is also referred to as methodological bricolage⁹ (Denzin & Lincoln 2011:194). This is the design adopted by this researcher owing to the nature of this study that cuts across law and policy, as well as the disciplines of disability and education, which makes the application of any one singular research design or theoretical framework untenable. The rationales for the choice of this design are further elaborated below.

Generic qualitative research design

Research design describes a “flexible set of guidelines that connect theoretical paradigms, first, to strategies of inquiry and second, to methods for collecting empirical material” (Denzin & Lincoln 2011:14). A research design “situates researchers in the empirical world and connects them to specific sites, peoples, institutions, and bodies of relevant interpretive material, including documents and archives” (Denzin & Lincoln 2011:14). It is the procedural plan and structure that is adopted by the researcher to obtain evidence to answer the research questions validly, objectively, accurately and economically (Kumar 2011:94).
The choice of the generic research designs emanates from the deliberate choice researchers make to use a combination of approaches rather than a particular methodological orientation (Lichtman 2010:88). This was then also the case for me. The generic research design is a bricolage of theoretical and methodological approaches borrowed from the various qualitative designs (Kincheloe, McLaren & Steinberg 2011:164). Instead of passively receiving “correct, universally-applicable methodologies” and “certified processes of logical analysis”, a researcher using this design actively makes up research methods from the tools at hand (Kincheloe et al. 2011:168). Researchers adopting the generic research design – as methodological bricoleurs – “enter into the research act as methodological negotiators” and steer clear of the “blinders of particular disciplines and peer through a conceptual window to a new world of research and knowledge production” (Steinberg 2011 cited in Kincheloe et al. 2011:168).
The inter- or cross-disciplinary nature of the study, which makes any one methodological or theoretical framework untenable for a more profound understanding of the research object (Kress 2011:103), makes this design fitting for this study. Two more reasons why the generic design befits this research are that it allowed the researcher to uncover the polymorphous nature of power, representations and actions (Brent 2009:48), and to engage in high level interpretation and “explication of theoretical influences”, serves as “an analytic framework that locates the interpretation within existing knowledge” (Thorne et al. 1997 cited in Caelli et al. 2003:2).
Two modes of inquiry are used for this study under the generic qualitative design: the enlightenment mode to policy and legal research and the critical discourse analysis mode. A mode of inquiry as an essential element of the research design refers to “a bundle of skills, assumptions, and practices that researchers employ as they move from their paradigm to the empirical world”. Modes of inquiry set “paradigms of interpretation into motion” and “connect the research to specific methods of collecting and analyzing empirical material” (Denzin & Lincoln 2011:14).
Even though both the enlightenment mode and policy discourse analysis are policy research methodologies of a critical bent, albeit with varying degrees, there is an apparent tension between these two research modes: the enlightenment mode bases itself on established theories and meta-narratives such as the social theory of disability, while critical policy discourse analysis rejects such totalising and technicist discourses. But, this tension seems to be an inherent part of the discussion surrounding the education of children with disabilities and policies of inclusion. On the one hand, the quasi-philosophical intent and language of social justice and belonging gives inclusion a status that rejects one unitary model or set of ideas. On the other hand, it is placed within a heavily technicist context which reduces the practice of inclusion to a set of techniques and skills (Ball 1994:24).
Within the framework of these research modes, the study involves the critical analysis of the relevant South African law and policy documents and the description of the information according to currently acceptable educational and human rights thinking and practice and existing discursive representations of disabled children and their schooling. Each of these modes of inquiry is discussed in detail in subsequent sections.

The enlightenment mode of critical law and policy research

Several modes of law and policy-oriented research are entertained in the literature, each with its own merits and demerits. The enlightenment mode is one of the several modes of law and policy research and one that is conceptually a major departure from traditional, rational and engineering modes, ranging from the linear mode, the problem-solving mode and the interactive mode, to the political mode and the tactical mode (refer to Figure 6).
Perhaps one of the crucial limitations of each of the first five modes to law and policy analysis, besides their assumption of law and policy-making processes as apolitical and value-free, is the fact that they embrace the reductionist assumption that law or policy is made by a single individual or group of individuals and agencies acting in unison as one rational individual – the “unitary policy actor assumption” (Malen & Knapp 1997:424). Nisbet (1999:16) calls the linear and problem solving modes naive, the interactive mode over-hopeful, while labelling the political and tactical modes cynical.
The enlightenment mode can be categorised as a critical approach to analysing policy and legislative texts though at a lower level compared to critical policy discourse analysis. The latter is at the apex of currently existing critical methodologies. Both these law and policy research modes remedy the shortcomings of traditional modes of law and policy studies, including the failure to acknowledge explicitly the fact that the policy process is inherently value-laden (Bacchi 1999 cited in Allan 2008:9).
In sharp contrast to the rational or engineering modes, the critical policy analysis mode, of which the enlightenment mode is one, encompasses efforts aimed at understanding the context in which policy arises, evaluating how policy-making processes are arranged, and assessing its context in terms of a particular set of education values. Such a policy analysis mode also allows investigating whose interests the policy serves, explaining how it might contribute to political advocacy, examining how a policy has been implemented, and with what outcomes (Taylor et al. 1997:20).
In much the same way as critical discourse analysis, the enlightenment mode leans towards qualitative methods of data collection and analysis (such as textual analysis), and adopts a relativist ontology, and works with a relativist/interpretivist epistemology. The relationship of this inquiry mode to law and policy lies in its function of enlightening law and policy makers as well as implementers and “challenging the accepted definitions of educational problems” (Trowler 2003:177).
The research of policy – a critical attribute to the enlightenment mode – sees the deconstruction of problem-construction work of policy as a necessary step in policy analysis (Lingard 2010:383). For Weiss (1979:429), the outcome of the law and policy-oriented research in the enlightenment mode is to shape how people, in this case, law and policy makers and implementers, think. Thanks to this approach, research can offer concepts and theoretical perspectives that permeate the policy-making process … percolating through informed publics and coming to shape the way in which people think about social issues”.
Hence, the enlightenment mode blurs the distinction between theory and research, and emphasises creating the right intellectual conditions for problem-solving, not just the provision of technical solutions (Finch 1985:123). According to DeClercq (2000:9), critical policy analysis attempts to address the issues related to the focus of the policy or how the problem is framed; the process it came through and the actors involved; its proposal of solving the problem and whose interests it is serving; its context and any gaps or tensions therein; its implementation context including the interests it privileges and marginalises; its consequences; and its contribution or not to social justice goals. Critical policy analysis also focuses on and is committed to unmasking or decoding ideological dimensions, values and assumptions of public policy (Doherty 2007:193).

CHAPTER ONE  INTRODUCTION OVERVIEW 
1.1 BACKGROUND
1.2 MOTIVATION OF THE RESEARCH
1.3 RESEARCH PROBLEM
1.4 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH
1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
1.6 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
1.7 RESEARCH QUALITY AND INTEGRITY
1.8 ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
1.9 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
1.10 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1.11 DEFINITION OF KEY TERMS
1.12 CHAPTER DIVISION
1.13 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER TWO  EDUCATION OF DISABLED CHILDREN: SYNCHRONISING HUMAN RIGHTS NORMS WITH EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 
2.1 INTRODUCTION
2.2 RIGHTS-BASED PERSPECTIVE TO EDUCATION .
2.3 HUMAN-RIGHTS BASED FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSING ACCESS TO EDUCATION
2.4 EDUCATIONAL FRAMEWORKS FOR EVALUATING SCHOOLING OF DISABLED CHILDREN
2.5 SYNCHRONISING HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARDS AND EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
2.6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER THREE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND DESIGN 
3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 RESEARCH APPROACH AND DESIGN
3.3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
3.4 SOURCES OF INFORMATION
3.5 DATA ANALYSIS
3.6 RESEARCH QUALITY AND INTEGRITY
3.7 ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
3.8 SUMMARY
CHAPTER FOUR  FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS: THEMATIC CONTENT ANALYSIS 
4.1 INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER FIVE  FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 
5.1 INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER SIX SUMMARY OF FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 
6.1 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS
6.2 RECOMMENDATIONS
6.3 LESSONS: TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION . 208
OF DISABLED CHILDREN
6.4 SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
6.5 FINAL WORDS
REFERENCES
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