It’s our project! People with learning difficulties managing and doing research

2004 Conference

We are a group of people with learning difficulties called the Learning Difficulties Research Team. The Department of Health asked us to find out all about good ways to involve people with learning difficulties in research. We are doing this by looking at what’s happened in 12 research projects funded by the government through the Valuing People white paper. We want to find out:

1. ?How people with learning difficulties got involved in these research projects.

2. What works and what doesn’t work about involving people with learning difficulties in research.

We are travelling around the country to meet people and ask them questions about their views and experiences. After we finish interviewing people we will put all our information together and publish a report, run a conference and do other things to tell people what we’ve found out.

This is an exciting project because we are the researchers and we are also running the project ourselves. We manage the money, make all the decisions and do the research.

We would like to tell people how we set up, manage and run a proper research project as a group of people with learning difficulties. We would like to tell people how we have learnt to do good, inclusive, empowering and accessible research and how we have overcome challenges and difficulties.

We can do this in the paper format, with questions and discussion or we can run a workshop. Both formats will be fully accessible. The workshop format would focus on what people with disabilities or other `service users’ can do to have more control over research and what non-disabled researchers can do to support us.