Using interviews to explore experiences of disability in sport and physical activity

In this chapter we explore how interviews can be a useful method of qualitative data collection to be used with disabled athletes.

Firstly, we offer a definition of interviews and provide examples of how this method has been used effectively across multiple disciplines within disability sport and physical activity research.

Secondly, we explore how people have been conceptualised as ‘different’ and the models by which disability has been explained and (mis)understood.

Thirdly, we draw upon our own experiences of conducting interviews with research participants who have experienced spinal cord injury (SCI) and have subsequently engaged in disability sport (James) and physical activity for rehabilitation (Toni). In doing so, we reflect on how we were required to challenge assumptions informed by our own non-disabled, sexed and gendered bodies, inviting the reader to learn from these ‘confessions’ in informing their own research practices.

Finally, having provided some of these experiences in the ‘field’, we offer some brief suggestions for taking a more informed, reflexive and empathetic approach to interviewing disabled research participants in sport and physical activity.

Abberley, P. (1987) The concept of oppression and the development of a social theory of disability. Disability, Handicap and Society 2(1), pp. 5-21.

Agar, M.H. (1996) The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. 2nd ed. New York: Academic Press.

Andersen, M. & Ivarsson, A. (2016) A methodology of loving kindness: how interpersonal neurobiology, compassion and transference can inform researcher-participant encounters and storytelling. Qualitative research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 8(1), pp.1-20

Ashton-Shaeffer, C., Gibson, H.J., Autry, C.E. & Hanson, C.S. (2001) Meaning of sport to adults with physical disabilities: a disability sport camp experience. Sociology of Sport Journal, 18 (1), pp. 95-114.

Barnes, C. & Mercer, G. (1996) Exploring the divide: Illness and disability. Leeds: Disability Press.

Barnes, C. & Mercer, G. (1997) Breaking the mould? An introduction to doing disability research. In Barnes, C. & Mercer, G. (eds.) Doing Disability Research. Leeds: The Disability Press.

Berger, R. (2004) Pushing forward: disability, basketball and me. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (5), pp.794-810.

Berger, R. (2008) Disability and the dedicated wheelchair athlete: beyond the supercrip critique. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 37 (6), pp 647-678.

Berger, R. (2009) Hoop Dreams on Wheels: Disability and the Competitive Wheelchair Athlete. New York: Routledge.

Brighton, J. (2015) Researching disabled sporting bodies: Reflections from an ‘able’-bodied ethnographer. In Wellard, I. (ed.) Embodied Research in Sport. London: Routledge.

Brighton, J. (2014) Narratives of spinal cord injury and the sporting body: An ethnographic study. Unpublished PhD thesis.

Brinkmann, S. (2013). Qualitative interviewing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bury, M. (1996) Defining and researching disability: Challenges and responses. In: Barnes, C. and Mercer, G., (eds.) Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability. Leeds: The Disability Press.

Campbell, F.K. (2009) Contours of ableism: The production of disability and abledness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Campbell, F.K. (2012) Stalking ableism: Using disability to expose ‘abled’ narcissism. In: Goodley, D., Hughes, B. & Davis, L. (eds.) Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 127 - 142.

Caudwell, K. (2014) Dyadic interviewing: A technique valuing interdependence in interviews with individuals with intellectual disabilities. Qualitative Research, 14(4), pp.488-507.

Cole, J. (2004) Still Lives: Narratives of Spinal Cord Injury. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dashper, K. (2010) ‘It's a Form of Freedom’: the experiences of people with disabilities within equestrian sport. Annals of Leisure Research, 13 (1-2), pp. 86-101.

Davis, L.J. (1997) Constructing normalcy: The bell curve, the novel, and the invention f the disable body in the nineteenth century. Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. London:Sage.

Denzin, N. (1989) Interpretive Biography. London: Sage.

Finkelstein, V. (1996). Outside, ‘Inside Out’. Coalition, April, pp. 30-36.

Frank, A. W. (2013). The wounded storyteller (2nd ed.). London: University of Chicago Press.

Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gerschick, T.J. & Miller, A.S. (1995) Coming to terms: masculinity and physical disability. In: Sabo, D. & Gordon, F.D. eds. Men’s Health and Illness: Gender, Power and the Body (pp. 183-204). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Goodley, D. (1999). Disability research and the “researcher template”: Reflections on grounded subjectivity in ethnographic research. Qulitative Inquiry, 5(1), pp. 24-46.

Goodley, D. (2011a) Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage.

Guthrie, S.R. (1999) Managing imperfection in a perfectionistic culture: Physical activity and disability management among women with disabilities. Quest, 51 (4), pp. 369-381.

Guthrie, S.R., & Castelnuovo, S. (2001) Disability management among women with physical impairments: the contribution of physical activity. Sociology of Sport Journal, 18 (1), pp. 5-20.

Hardin,M. (2007) “I consider myself an empowered woman”: The interaction of sport, Gender and Disability in the Lives of Wheelchair Basketball Players. Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal, 16 (1), pp. 39-52.

Huang, C. J. & Brittain, I. (2006) Negotiating identities through disability sport. Sociology of Sport Journal, 23 (4), pp. 352-375.

Hughes, B. (1999) The constitution of impairment: modernity and the aesthetic of oppression. Disability and Society, 14 (2), pp. 155-172.

Hunt, P. (1981) Settling Accounts with the Parasite People: A Critique of "A Life Apart" by E.J. Miller and G.V. Gwynn. Disability Challenge 1 (May 1981): pp. 37-50.

Kleiber, D. & Hutchinson, S. (1999) Heroic masculinity in the recovery from spinal cord injury. In: Sparkes, A.C. & Silvennoinen, M. eds. Talking bodies: Men’s Narratives of the Body and Sport. University of Jyvaskyla, Finland: SoPhi, pp. 135-155.

McRuer, R., (2006b) Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press.

Mercer, G. (2002) Emancipatory Disability Research. In Barnes, C., Oliver, M. & Barton, L. (eds.) Disability Studies Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Moola, F. & Norman, M. (2012) Transcending ‘Hoop Dreams’: Toward a consideration of corporeality, crossroads and intersections, and discursive possibilities in disability and theory. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 4, pp. 284-295.
Morris, J. (1992) ‘Personal and political: A feminist perspective in researching physical disability. Disability, Handicap and Society, 7(2), pp. 157-166.

Oliver, M. (1992) Changing the social relations of research production. Disability, Handicap and Society, 7(2), pp. 101-114.

Oliver, M. (1996) Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Page, S., O’Connor, S. & Peterson, K. (2001) Leaving the disability ghetto: a qualitative study of factors underlying achievement motivation among athletes with disabilities. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 25 (1), pp. 40-55.

Papathomas, A., Williams, T.L., & Smith, B. (2015). Understanding physical activity participation in spinal cord injured populations: Three narrative types for consideration. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being. DOI: 10.3402/qhw.v10.27295.

Peers, D. (2012) Interrogating disability: The (de)composition of a recovering Paralympian, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 4 (2), pp. 175-188.

Perrier, M-J., Smith, B., & Latimer-Cheung, A. E. (2013). Narrative environments and the capacity of disability narratives to motivate leisure-time physical activity among individuals with spinal cord injury. Disability and Rehabilitation 35(24), 2089-2096.

Randall, W.L. and Phoenix, C. (2009) The problem with truth in qualitative interview: reflections from a narrative perspective. Qualitative research in Sport and Exercise, 1(2), pp. 125-140.

Richardson, E. V., Smith, B., & Papathomas, A. (2017). Disability and the gym: Experiences, barriers and facilitators of gym use for individuals with physical disabilities. Disability & Rehabilitation, 39(19), 1950-1957.

Sands, R.G. & Krumer-Nevo, M. (2006) Interview shocks and shockwaves. Qualitative Inquiry, 12 (5), pp. 950-971.

Shakespeare, T. (2006) Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge.

Shakespeare, T., Gillespie-Sells, K. & Davies, D. (1996) The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. London and New York: Cassell.

Shildrick, M. (2007). Dangerous discourses: anxiety, desire and disability. Studies in Gender & Sexuality, 8 (3), pp. 221-244.

Shuttleworth, R. & Sanders, S. (2011). Sex and Disability: Politics, Identity and Access. Leeds: The Disability Press.

Smith, B. & Sparkes, A.C. (2008) Changing bodies, changing narratives and the consequences of tellability: a case of becoming disabled through sport. Sociology of Health & Illness, 30 (2), pp. 217-236.

Smith, B. & Sparkes, A.C. (2016) Interviews: qualitative interviewing in the sport and exercise sciences. In: Smith, B. & Sparkes, A.C. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise (pp. 103-123). London & New York: Routledge.

Smith, B. (2008) Imagining being disabled through playing sport: the body and alterity as limits to imagining others’ lives. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2 (2), pp. 142-157.

Smith, B. (2013b) Disability, sport, and men’s narratives of health: a qualitative study. Health Psychology, 3 (2), pp. 87-107.

Smith, B., & Bundon, A. (2017). Disability models: Explaining and understanding disability sport. In I. Brittain (Ed.), Palgrave handbook of Paralympic studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Smith, B., Caddick, N., & Williams, T.L. (2015). Qualitative methods and conceptual advances in sport psychology. In S.D. Mellalieu & S. Hanton (Eds.). Contemporary advances in sport psychology: A review (pp.202-225). London: Routledge.

Sparkes, A. C. (2001) Myth 94: qualitative researchers will agree about validity. Qualitative Health Research, 11 (4), pp. 538-552.