In each story, researchers looked for any occasion portraying or implying a relationship between people with and without physical and sensory impairments. These occasions are the main unit of analysis. The occasions that explicitly portray relationships between story characters either display conversations between people or describe the physical interaction between them. The occasions that imply a relationship between the characters do not contain the actual conversation or interaction. However, the social context still suggests a relationship between story characters with or without impairments. For example, a description of a child getting a letter from a friend suggests such a relation. The content of the letter or the child’s described feelings in the story provided us with enough material to infer about the type of the relationship between them. While analyzing the roles of the characters with and without impairments, the researchers employed techniques of content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002).
