Participatory Research

“Hi, my name is Liliane. One challenge with doing participatory autism research is just to get started.

Often time research teams have funding for a research project that's already going on and they may not have planned uh time and resources to hire a community partner on their team. And so it becomes this series of pushing it to later to start doing it.

A lot of community partners don't ask to be paid. Obviously, if you can have some uh funding internally from your um institution, that is great but don't take that as an excuse if you don't have the funding.

If you have a project going on already, reach out to people, maybe previous research participants and tell them you want to talk about this project that you're leading and get their input on it.

Um as you improve what you're doing, you're going to have new ideas um as you listen to your research partners. Then you're going to be in a great position to write this really nice new grant that does have input from your community partners from the beginning and you'll have thought about what you need in order to engage in that new project in terms of time, resources um, and salaries.

So, I'm so excited you're interested in doing participatory research with community partners and know that there are many people in the community who are just waiting for you to reach out to them.”