Research with persons with intellectual disabilities: An inclusive adaptation of Tourangeau's model

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how Tourangeau's model of survey response (Tourangeau, 1984) can be adapted to facilitate research with people with intellectual disabilities. As the focus on voice of marginalized people become increasingly important, especially when involving service outcomes and policy making, researchers in fields such as quality of life continue to seek sound research methods to present true voice of such persons. To achieve this, this paper consolidates challenges and strategies of research methods among literature and identifies additional challenges and strategies through the current study. It then describes the development of this current study, which examined the transition outcomes of youth with mild intellectual disabilities (i.e. change in status for young people after formally leaving school, from behaving primarily as students to assuming adult roles in the community). The purpose of this is to demonstrate how Tourangeau's model may be used more inclusively in conjunction with the three dimensions of Triple-I. In summary, Tourangeau's model can be a helpful tool, when used with an inclusive adaptation to facilitate many aspects of the self-reported data collecting process from the design and preparation procedures, through to the data collection. The findings lead us to look beyond the traditional research on instrumentation, which has mostly focused on the dimension of interviewee and instrument. The other two dimensions of interviewee-instrument mediated by interviewer, and interviewee-interviewer revealed in the study add value to methodological quality.