This section will concentrate on the outcomes of nine Focus Groups with
disabled people. The aims of these Focus Groups were threefold: to
discover how a range of disabled people felt about how non-disabled
people perceived them and what attitudes, representations and beliefs
they thought non-disabled people used; to understand how disabled
people thought they were portrayed in the print media and what language
they found appropriate and inappropriate to describe their lives; to
discuss whether they felt that non-disabled people treated people born
with disabilities differently from those with acquired disabilities.
The purpose of these groups is to provide supporting and
background data, which the study will be able to use to correlate with the
storyboard material and the newspaper articles. This will allow the
research to compare actual lived experience with the representations of
disability presented in the subjects’ stories and newspaper articles. This
will act as a form of triangulation. This multi-method technique is strongly
recommended by researchers such as De Rosa and Wagner because
Social Representations are composed of many facets and no one
technique can be assured of illustrating its makeup.