Price notes that multiple shifts occurred during the designing and conducting of the Disabled Academic Study: mainly widening the types of disabilities included and the types of academics included. 

Shifts in Designing the Study

The survey was created by Price along with Mark Salzer, who is a academic in the field of social and behavior sciences and psychology. After survey creation Stephanie Kerschbaum, an academic in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and disability, and Amber O'Shea, an academic in the field of educational psychology joined the team for analysis of the survey.

Individuals Involved in Survey Creation

To code interviews for the Disabled Academics Study (DAS), the research team used grounded theory, discourse analysis, and category construction.

Interview Coding in Disabled Academics Study

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

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 

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. 

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