This chapter examines how studies focused on the same topic—disproportionality in special education—can generate vastly different conclusions about its sources and causes. By analyzing existing disagreements in the field, we explore essential questions about what constitutes high-quality and relevant evidence when seeking to understand how, when, for whom, and why disproportionality occurs. Using a holistic review of the empirical literature on disproportionality, we illustrate how differing epistemological and ontological views inform research around the topic of disability in schools and argue that to develop high-quality evidence around disproportionality, researchers need a shared framework that describes how school-based disabilities and classification processes intersect. A shared framework will enable researchers to evaluate whether their findings are expected or unexpected, connect to other related research, and build and rebuild paradigms around issues of equity in special education, rather than disregard one set of findings over another.

本章探讨了针对同一主题（特殊教育中的不成比例）的研究如何产生关于其来源和原因的截然不同的结论。通过分析该领域中现有的分歧，我们在寻求理解如何，何时，针对谁以及为什么发生不成比例问题时，探索了有关什么构成高质量和相关证据的基本问题。通过对不成比例性经验文献的整体回顾，我们说明了不同的认识论和本体论观点如何为围绕学校残疾问题的研究提供了信息，并指出，为了围绕不成比例性开发高质量的证据，研究人员需要一个共享的框架来描述学校如何-基于基础的残疾和分类过程相交。