Price noted that when Mary Lee Vance tried to curate an anthology of work by disabled women of color who were faculty and staff for Vance's anthology Disabled Faculty and Staff in a Disabling Society, challenges with finding and recruiting participants led to Vance having to widen the scope of the anthology to, more broadly, all disabled faculty and staff.

How Challenges Finding Participants Had Affected Prior Studies

Price found that often individuals are very wary about identifying as disabled at work, especially to researchers with the past harms researchers have done to disabled research participants. Because of this Price took an approach of building trust with research participants and thinking deeply about research accessibility. 

In 2011 when Price began thinking of researching disabled academics there was no large-scale studies of disabled faculty, staff, or graduate students. When studies existed, for instance a National Science Foundation study that looked just at graduating doctoral candidates, it didn't look across a variety of disciplines and was only quantitative. There were some small case studies of first person accounts but there was no larger body of work to find themes between these experiences.

Impetus of the Disabled Academics Study

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Price notes that it was important that the Disabled Academics Study collected qualitative data because, the small case studies there were did allow disabled academics to describe their experience in their own words rather than having their experience hemmed in by quantitative categorization, but that previous small case studies hadn't been able to paint an overarching picture of disabled life in academia.

Impact of the Disabled Academics Study being Qualitative 

Challenges with Finding Participants

Price's study consisted of two phases - an anonymous survey and then in-depth interviews with participants.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After