When numbers don’t add up and words can’t explain: Challenges in defining disability in higher education

Abstract

This paper follows the discursive loops we have been attempting to untangle as a result of our work on a federally sponsored 3-year mixed methods research project at a private, not-for-profit university, which we will call Midwestern Regional University (MRU), in the mid-western United States. Grounded in the social model of disability, the project aimed to improve MRU's ability to provide a quality education for disabled students. We explore two sets of tensions: methodological ones that emanate from different epistemological assumptions of qualitative and quantitative inquiry that we combined, and theoretical ones stemming from different ideological underpinnings that position the medical and social model of disability as incongruent. These methodological and theoretical tensions also reverberated to the ethical and political aspects of our research.