Methodological innovation, adaptation and disruption: the peculiar case of research with people with profound intellectual disabilities

Understanding the nature of methodological innovation, adaptation and disruption in social science methods is a complex challenge. I take a particular case – researching with people with profound intellectual disabilities as subjects of knowledge – and show my development and application of a new approach for examining methodological innovation within it. The paper outlines the stages of selecting papers claiming methodological progression; mapping relationships between methodological developments; extracting target data from the papers; coding the data extracted; and seeking patterns and meaning. The outcome is learning how innovations come about, their nature and journeys within a small field where the people and their ways of knowing have been seen as unresearchable. The paper concludes that disrupting the assumption that people with profound disabilities cannot tell their perspective has been a catalyst for methodological development, and the approach to studying this was effective in clarifying the interconnected nature of such innovations.