Facilitating choice when engaging young people with disabilities: reflections from co-researcher training.

Background: A collaborative approach is critical in inclusive research and should incorporate taking time to build relationships with co-researchers based on trust and shared understanding. Involvement can often be seen as tokenistic and in order to avoid this, it is important to provide opportunities for people to exercise choice throughout the research process. Main body: The current paper outlines learnings from a co-researcher training process for young people with disabilities to identify the ways in which meaningful choice can be facilitated with this group. While conducting training of co-researchers in topics such as research methods, we were continuously led by the group with regards to the directions that the sessions took and promoted problem solving with the group to accommodate the unique needs of all members. The overall aim of a wider project was to develop research capacity in a group of young people with disabilities through co-researcher training and this paper will report on learnings from this work with regards to how we sought to provide opportunities for the co-researchers to exercise choice within research projects. Feedback from the group of young people highlighted the variety of needs and expectations that must be accommodated in such a process and therefore, allowing them to dictate the extent and manner of their engagement is key. Young people with disabilities are a heterogeneous group and therefore, some methodologies and ways of working required adaptation in order to facilitate meaningful choice and engagement for all. Conclusion: Providing meaningful opportunities for demonstrating their choices, in relation to elements of research projects, is a critical component of facilitating a rights-based approach when conducting co-research and requires researchers to cede some level of control over the research process to co-researchers. This can be difficult to achieve in practice and researchers must continuously reflect on their own practice and be willing to change and adapt throughout the process. Plain English summary: It is very important that all members of society can be part of research teams so that researchers can develop projects that will provide good outcomes, however, not all people with disabilities have opportunities to take part in research projects. This project supported a group of young people with disabilities to develop research skills through a set of workshops and this paper describes what the researchers learned from these workshops. This paper will help researchers to understand how best to capture the voices of this population for future research. Young people with disabilities are all different and must be supported to give their opinion in the way that suits them best. Researchers must always think about the ways that they work and change how they work if it is not good for supporting young people with disabilities to work with them on research projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]