Flying with wheels

: a netnographical inquiry into the wheelchair-using community's expectations of airline services

Abstract

This thesis examines the service quality expectations of the wheelchair-using community regarding airline services, with the aim of addressing a persistent gap between the ambitions of accessible tourism and the operational reality of air travel. Decades of accessible tourism research have documented the experiences of the wheelchair-using community, yet the constraints they face remain unresolved. This inquiry moves beyond constraint identification to
operationalisation, producing an accessible airline service quality framework grounded in community expertise as the concrete output of this research.

The theoretical foundation draws on two established bodies of literature. The first is the models and categories of the constraints, negotiations and facilitators literature, grounded in the leisure constraints model (Crawford and Godbey, 1987; Crawford, Jackson and Godbey, 1991), the categorisation of negotiation strategies (Jackson, Crawford and Godbey, 1993; Hubbard and Mannell, 2001), and the facilitators categorisation (Orakani, Smith and Weaver, 2021), situated within a four-layered ecosystem (Stodolska, Shinew and Camarillo, 2020). The
second is service quality theory, drawing on the SERVQUAL dimensions (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985;1988) and the disability-focused ARCHSECRET framework (Vaughan and Shiu, 2001). Following the call by Rosenbaum et al. (2020) for transformative service research to extend service management frameworks to overlooked consumer groups, this inquiry applies that principle to the wheelchair-using community as both a theoretical necessity and a practical imperative.

The inquiry employed a transformative netnographic methodology, utilising Twitter as the primary ethnographic field. Twitter was subsequently rebranded as X following its acquisition in 2023 but is referred to throughout this thesis as Twitter for consistency. Data was gathered through three complementary movements: a six-year longitudinal immersion within the wheelchair-using community on Twitter from 2018 to 2024; systematic text mining of the Twitter public application programming interface to extract community discourse beyond the algorithmic timeline of the researcher; and twenty-two semi-structured interviews with members of the wheelchair-using community. This triangulated dataset was analysed abductively, combining inductive reflexive thematic analysis with deductive application of the proposed dual conceptual framework. The inquiry is situated within the transformative paradigm and conducted by a non-disabled researcher whose insider/outsider positioning,
constituted through nine years of sustained advocacy and community membership as the parent of a wheelchair-using child, required sustained critical reflexivity throughout and is examined as a methodological contribution in its own right.

Five findings are presented. The first confirms the four-layer ecosystem of constraints, negotiations and facilitators in the airline services context, extending the negotiation categorisation of Hubbard and Mannell (2001) with an ‘extreme’ category at the systemic layer and extending the facilitator categorisation of Orakani, Smith and Weaver (2021) to six categories through the addition of ‘policy’ and ‘prototype’ at the systemic layer. The second and third findings establish the wheelchair-using community as knowledgeable, solution-focused and collaborative consumers, and as the essential agent through which constraints, negotiations and facilitators are reframed as service quality expectations. The fourth finding presents the accessible airline service quality framework: seven dimensions and eighty expectation statements grounded in community evidence and expressed in the service quality language the airline industry already understands. The fifth finding addresses the distinctive evidential contribution produced by the unintended longitudinal character of the inquiry, extended through and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.

The inquiry contributes to theory, methodology and practice. Theoretically, it produces the Integrated Conceptual Constraints-to-Expectations Framework, fulfilling the proposed dual conceptual framework and providing a reproducible mechanism for translating community evidenced constraints into accessible service quality expectations applicable beyond the airline context. Methodologically, it contributes to the application of transformative netnography in disability and accessibility research and advances the insider/outsider positioning debate by evidencing sustained allyship and advocacy as a legitimate form of insider knowledge. Practically, it provides the airline industry with a framework drawn from community evidence through which accessible services can be designed, evaluated and improved, and contributes to the conditions under which accessible aviation becomes an achievable reality rather than an unrealised ambition.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Canterbury Christ Church University