Objetivos

Consistent with a critical paradigmatic position (Given, 2008), I maintain that my values and lived experiences cannot, and should not, be separated from the research process. As such, I did not try to eliminate these influences; instead I acknowledge that my positionality informed this work (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). In this next section, I will describe who I am as researcher in relation to the thesis topic and my participants, and I will reflect on those personal experiences that led me to choose my research focus.

I held multiple positionalities in relation to my primary sample of research participants, who identified both as older adults and as disabled. Drawing upon critical disability and gerontological scholars, I begin with the assumption that both the identity of being older and of being disabled are marginalized in society and subject to various inequalities on account of those ageist and ableist

assumptions which permeate social consciousness, practices, and constructions. In contrast to this lived experience, at the time of writing this, I am a twenty-nine year old Caucasian female in the Rehabilitation Sciences (Health and Aging) program at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. I own my own home in a safe rural community. I do not self-identify as having a disability nor is my occupational engagement significantly restricted by virtue of environmental constraints. Since 2008, I have been a registered occupational therapist who completed her Masters of Science in Occupational Therapy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.My interest in ARVL began during the second year of my occupational therapy training. I had an opportunity to

complete an independent study course on an area of occupational therapy

practice I was unfamiliar with. My passion throughout my undergraduate (Honors Bachelor of Arts in Gerontology) and graduate school training had been in

geriatrics and so I knew I wanted the focus to be on older adults. After considerable self-reflection, I identified a lack of personal knowledge as it

pertained to vision loss in older adulthood. I also came to realize that this was an under-researched area of occupational therapy practice in Canada with only two occupational therapist researchers, Drs. Laliberte Rudman and Packer, that I was able to identify, who were consistently publishing on the topic area (Laliberte Rudman & Durdle, 2008; Laliberte Rudman et al., 2010; MacLachlan et al., 2007; Packer, Girdler, Boldy, Dhaliwal & Crowley, 2009; Packer, Simpson, Drury, Sim, Periera & Re, 2009). It was through this learning experience that my passion for contributing meaningful research, relevant to ARVL, first emerged. After working clinically for two years in private practice, with individuals who had been involved in motor vehicle accidents, I returned to school to begin my doctoral studies in 2010 to more fully explore this passion.

My position within society, as articulated above, relative to my research participants, is one of privilege and power. This privileged position ultimately influenced each decision I made during the research process including how I chose my research topic, how I negotiated my entry into the field, how I

saw and did not see in the data sets, and finally what information I chose to include, and by extension exclude, in the published manuscripts. I acknowledge this influence on the research process. As a result, I engaged in conscious

reflexivity about those decisions and assumptions I made throughout the process and how those were influenced by my various positionalities. This conscious reflexivity was intended to help maintain my critical engagement with the research process (Finlay, 2006). I also engaged in collective reflexivity by discussing my evolving coding with my supervisor and sharing my writing with committee members in an effort to push me to challenge my assumptions as well as transform my understandings and perspectives over time.

I also acknowledge that my prior research experience on a grounded theory study about ARVL (see section 3.3.2), my employment with CNIB (see section 3.3.2) and my clinical occupational therapy background shaped what I

anticipated finding in my research study. Coming into this dissertation work, I held three primary assumptions including:

1) I assumed the research participants would address those physical environmental barriers which restricted their occupational engagement. I did not, however, anticipate that the research participants would address as many cultural, social, political, or institutional barriers. However, as demonstrated in chapter seven, the research participants spoke in great detail of the myriad of environment restrictions to their occupational engagement.

2) I did not presume that the older adult research participants would speak to their experiences of low vision from the perspective of critical disability theory or critical gerontology. Yet, rich and detailed experiences emerged on topics related to risk, independence, ageism, ableism, and stigma throughout the empirical findings. As the researcher, operating within a critical theory paradigm, I was then able to interpret the findings within the context of these two guiding theoretical perspectives.

3) I did not anticipate such variability in terms of the occupations the participants choose for their observation visit. I was surprised as to the degree of community travel I participated in as I journeyed to malls, grocery stores, pharmacies, and banks with participants either by walking or taking public transportation. These unexpected experiences spoke to my own pre-supposition that my research participants would be more occupationally withdrawn, perhaps stemming from my embeddedness in the literature that has tended to focus on what seniors with ARVL cannot or do not do versus what occupations they continue to be actively

engaged in.

I engaged in reflexive practices (as further described in section 3.9), such as journaling, in an effort to forefront these pre-suppositions and how they were influencing the research process, specifically during data collection and analysis.