ABSTRACT

Adapted physical education (APE) researchers embraced qualitative inquiry in the 1990s. Since that time, the lived experiences of school-aged students, peers, teachers, and parents have been studied. Qualitative inquiry is presented as a five-phase process that demands rigorous cohesion from one phase to the next. The phases include articulating researcher positionality, acknowledging paradigmatic assumptions, identifying research methodologies, selecting strategies for gathering information, and recognizing the art and politics of constructing interpretative texts. The methodological approaches taken up by adapted physical education researchers include grounded theory, ethnography, interpretive phenomenology, action research, narrative inquiry, and arts-based research. Each is described and illustrated with published work in our field. Through this body of work, researchers have unearthed the social lives of individuals, the constraints of everyday life, the richness of social worlds, and barriers to inclusion in our classrooms and communities.