This book builds upon the research project ‘the reception of disability policy’, funded by LIEPP as part of its 2013 call for projects. The project aimed at providing an overview of how the changing context of disability policy in France (notably since the adoption of the 2005 law) had impacted disabled people’s lives and how they reacted to it.

This appendix provides complementary elements on methodology, beyond what is presented in the introduction.

The study draws on 30 biographical interviews with people with either visual (N=15) or mobility (N=15) impairments, conducted between November 2014 and January 2016.

Because of my interest in the consequences of long-term legal and policy change, I chose to focus on two types of impairments, visual and mobility impairments, which have been legally recognized for a long time (as opposed to more ‘recent’ ones in French disability policy, such as mental health conditions or learning disabilities, which have only been recognized as disabilities since the 2005 law). In the post I disseminated to find research participants, I also limited the perimeter to people who had lived with an impairment for more than 15 years. This followed the same idea of tracking the effects of policy and legal changes in individual lives; I also sought to meet people whose relation to their impairment was rather stabilized, who were not in the middle of a major biographical disruption.

The goal of studying policy reception poses a challenge regarding how the object of research is to be presented to participants. Indeed, in a similar way to the approach promoted by legal consciousness studies, the aim is to include in the perimeter of inquiry (although not exclusively of course) people who have a very distant relationship to law and policy. This, concretely, raised the question of how the research would be presented in the call to potential participants. Being too explicit about the policy focus of the research in the call risked inducing a selection bias against people who would not feel competent to answer questions about policy. Conversely, not mentioning it raised ethical issues.