Disability is one of the most contested terms in social sciences as well as in other related disciplines like medicine (Florian / McLaughlin 2008). The view on disability is highly influences by societal and cultural factors (Ingstad, Reynolds Whyte 1995).

In 2010 the international and comparative research project CLASDISA (Website: http://classifications-of-disabilities.univie.ac.at/) started. It is a 5-years-project (duration: 1.2.2010 – 31.1.2015) in basic research, financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), which targets on societal and cultural aspects of disability. The project tries to investigate barriers and facilitators in education environments for students with disabilities between 8 and 12 years in different societal and cultural contexts. The countries were selected due to their societal development, related to the Human Development Index (UNDP 2007). Austria is a highly developed country. Thailand is among the newly industrialized countries. Its level of development is regarded as medium. Ethiopia is one of the least developed countries, but with strong efforts to combat illiteracy and to deliver education for all. All the three countries were not affected by colonialism, as they were not colony-holders nor were they colonized. The concept of disability is different among the three countries. The study focuses on those with limitations of visual, hearing, motor and intellectual functions, due to organic impairments. These are groups which are regarded as “disabled” in any of the three countries. The investigation refers to the children and youth version of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF-CY) (WHO 2007).

The research was done with a unique design and data were collected in the capitals of the 3 countries, in Vienna (Austria), Bangkok (Thailand) and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

The overall question of the research project was to identify facilitators and barriers in educational environment. The data were collected by one doctoral student in each country, supported by local staff employed by the project in Bangkok and Addis Ababa and members of cooperating Universities (Addis Ababa University and Srinakharinwirot University in Bangkok). A fourth doctoral student was in charge with the development of the quantitative surveys under a comparative perspective. Beside this main research activities the data collection involved also document analyses, expert interviews, interviews with children, methods of investigating the physical environment of schools. But the main activity consisted in collecting quantitative and qualitative data with parents and teachers. The following contribution focuses only the relations between parents and teachers, their different roles and mutual expectations, as they were represented in the interview texts. So it is a special topic of analyses of the large data set within the complex project design.

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