Partnership with parents of disabled children in research?

Parent/professional partnership is a key theme in government policy and service delivery for parents of disabled children, yet there is little evidence of such partnerships in research. Drawing on the literature concerning parents’ experiences of caring for and raising a child with additional needs; parental involvement and partnerships and the social analysis of disability, this article sets out the rationale for parents’ participation in educational research. It proposes a parents’ participatory research approach adapted from a disability or emancipatory research paradigm, which the author used when conducting her doctoral research. She describes how there was evidence of parental participation in the study on three levels, through, firstly, the parent/researcher who initiated and co‐ordinated the study; secondly, the parents’ advisory group, who advised the researcher, completed some analysis and discussed the findings and, thirdly, the parents in the sample, who were offered opportunities to participate, for example, in decisions concerning the content of the data and development of the research methods that were used. Finally, the article discusses to what extent the parents participating in this study were given a voice to express their views, some control over the research process and so were treated as partners in the research process. It concludes that this research study has extended the notion of working in partnership with parents to the field of research and demonstrated that a parents’ participatory research approach is possible. It now needs to be developed and replicated in other studies with parents of disabled children.