Abstract
This study examined the role of the narratives of a researcher in a residents’ meeting on municipal disability policy. The research focuses on sessions from 2013 to 2019 of a local meeting spanning approximately 20 years in Yao City, Osaka, western Japan. As an advisory staff member and researcher, I recorded the meetings and analyzed them through the KJ method (a bottom-up qualitative procedure developed in Japan) and text mining. As a result, I suggested that the annual symposium should be an opportunity to promote people’s awareness of disability issues. Appropriate topics for the symposium were considered to be the Disability Discrimination Act and the hardships experienced by people with disability following a disaster, because these covered various aspects of their lives. I asked them to respect the diversity of their disabilities. I also remarked that they could support people with and without disabilities during a disaster. I assert that my role was to promote awareness and narratives in members about aspects of themselves about which they were unaware, such as their potential roles as supporters. However, they gradually recognized the uncertainty and new difficulties, which generated productive narratives.
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Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Notes
“2015-4a” indicates Fiscal Year 2015, fourth meeting. This format applies to all subsequent mentions in the text. When citing various quotations from the same meeting, I added the letters “a”, “b”, and “c,” to avoid confusion.
Each excerpt presented in the text mining section does not address all of the words contained in each cluster because I focus on only the essential aspects of my statements.
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Acknowledgements
I appreciate the members of the residents’ meeting and Yao officials for their cooperation with the current study.
Funding
This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Grant 18K02110, from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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I verbally briefed all members about my advisory and researcher status, the study’s objectives, participants’ ability to withdraw from the study, and the privacy policy, which was intended to preserve the collected data carefully and called for the use of pseudonyms for all subjects in all publications. Members all verbally consented and reported having understood the briefing. The ethics committee of the relevant university approved the study protocol.
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Tagaki, M. The Narratives of a Researcher with Disability as Interventions in Local Disability Policy-making. Integr. psych. behav. 57, 65–87 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-022-09720-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-022-09720-5