ABSTRACT
The choice of a methodology for a sociological study is inevitably bound up with the nature of the problem which the researcher has chosen to work on. After the creation of the Inner London Education Authority under local authority re-organisation, the City of B became the second largest education authority in England, and despite a slow decline in the overall population of the city, the number of children in school continued to increase. The city is well-provided for with a variety of types of special school, the most recent being a new campus containing an educational subnormality and physically handicapped school, which opened in 1976. While the status of mild educational subnormality children places them firmly in a 'social problem' class, observation of the individual study population children during the course of the research did call into question 'who defined' the problem. The interview schedules were analysed and other material, for example notes made during initial conversations, were also used.
