Definición conceptual y operacional de las variables…………………….68-70

In relation to research, concerns are about the process of research itself. Traditional research approaches, adopting the individual/medical (biophysical) model to

described as having ‘learning difficulties’ as an object of study. The centrality of disabled people’s ‘voices’ has had less legitimacy than medical, rehabilitation, educational and welfare discourses. Postmodernist frameworks offer insights into understanding research process as a tool of surveillance, control, regulation, discipline, punishment and exclusion. Indeed, Spradley (1980, p.22) makes clear that the method of participant observation ‘represents a powerful tool for invading

other people’s way of life’. More than this, the research process is imbued with

power/knowledge discourses hierarchically ordered, controlled by ethics committees existing of dualisms such as supervisor-student and researcher-researched. The work of Robert Edgerton, for example, considered to be a significant milestone in understanding the lives of individuals labelled as ‘mentally retarded’, is itself a case in point (Edgerton, 1971, 1984). Using a social interactionist framework, Edgerton sought to understand the lives of individuals, who had been ‘deinstitutionalised’ from a state hospital in America. Edgerton’s methodological gaze began, for instance, by explaining:

In June 1960, the search for the 110 members of the cohort was begun. All available sources were utilized in the effort to locate the former patients: Pacific’s records, living relatives, former employers, hospital-affiliated social workers, Los Angeles welfare agencies, training schools, police files, coroners’ records and private hospital

admissions, private physicians and dentists, telephone directories, credit agencies, credit departments of larger retail stores, and finally, the advice of a retired private investigator. (Edgerton, 1971, p.11)

Thus, arguably, it seems that such individuals are positioned within a

power/knowledge discourse, a reiterative re–search process which secures their position as ‘powerless, inept people who were in a trap, from which the chances of

escape were [and are] very small’ (Gerber, 1990, p.11, my insertion). Indeed, twelve

months after Edgerton’s search concluded, 12 of the participants had not been located (Edgerton, 1971, p.11); moreover, they had escaped (probably free and

alone, and de-in-situ-tionalised). Incidentally, Edgerton (1984, p.502) also

advocated the use of participant observation and whilst suggesting that ‘... retarded [sic] persons remain, for us, first among equals’, he also earlier made the point that, ‘What retarded [sic] persons say they do or feel often bears little resemblance to what they actually do. (Edgerton, 1984, p.500, original emphasis). So much for, so called, ‘retarded’ being first among equals. Arguably, the object of such ‘re-search’ is frequently on people (rather than with people) who are in less powerful positions (Mills, 2009). Mills draws upon the way Foucault characterises power/knowledge to discuss this point, citing:

… the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of [the] fundamental implications of power-

knowledge and their historical transformations. In short it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it, and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge. (Foucault,

1991a, pp.27 – 28, cited Mills, 2009, p.70)

Mills’ point being that the myth related to the development of knowledge is due to the devotion and best intentions of innumerable scholars who work to improve on past knowledge, should be interrogated. Indeed, it is power/knowledge which produces facts, and individual scholars are simply the vehicles or sites where this knowledge is produced (Mills, 2009), they cannot but establish power relations between themselves and the group.

No doubt, the ‘re-search’ process is part of the problem. Scott and Usher (1999), for instance, argue that the internal conditions of research are spurious and place philosophical issues as being integral to the research process itself. It is not just about methods and outcomes. They question assumptions that tend to portray research as mechanistic and algorithmic. Moreover, they urge researchers to

become more aware that research ‘is not a technology but a practice, that it is not

individualistic but social and that there are no universal methods to be applied invariantly’ (Scott and Usher, 1999, p.10). Further they argue that ‘the rules’ ‘... for policing knowledge claims are themselves culturally located; epistemologies thus become as much as about politics or power as they are about logic’ (Scott and

Usher, 1999, p.12). With reference to power, they draw upon a colonial analogy, stating that it is the colonist who:

… defines the problem, the nature of the research, the quality of the interaction between researcher and

researched, the theoretical framework and the categories of analysis; and, of course, who writes the final text. (Scott

and Usher, 1999, p.17)

Thus, for Scott and Usher (1999, p.22) research has been acknowledged as an inter-textual field where text is pitched against text where ‘writing is a necessary

condition for claims to knowledge, it is also the means by which this condition can be denied’. The incessant obsession with re-search, which consistently produces

and reproduces the ‘Other’ as ‘abnormal’, ‘deficient’ and as a ‘personal tragedy’, serves only to justify its institutional gaze onto those it excludes without any contact or physical proximity (Foucault, 1967, 1977, 1980). Indeed, as positivism loses its grip, postmodernism has turned the re-search gaze on itself as a critical tool questioning why, how, what and asking ‘in whose interest does research serve?’ Such concerns relate to the work of Becker (1967) who asked ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ a theme I have discussed before (Kikabhai, 2003).