A Dialogic Approach to Working Inclusively in a Research Reference Committee

This paper reports the use of a dialogic approach to working inclusively with two young people with intellectual disability as part of a Research Reference Committee for a project that examined how adults with intellectual disability and their families plan for their future. The paper begins with an overview of the role of the Research Reference Committee written by the research team to provide the context for reporting. We then discuss and reflect on how we used mediated talk to working with the young people with intellectual disability to develop strategies for enabling them to actively contribute to the reference committee. The third section of the paper was co-written with authors 3 and 4. The structure follows their decisions about how they wanted to write this section in ways that allowed them to tell their stories of participation as narratives, using their own words. In the discussion, we acknowledge the challenges of co-authorship and consider the benefits of using an iterative dialogical approach to enable the active participation of these young people in a reference committee, and as a method of co-authoring that allows a broader dissemination the voices of the young people with intellectual disability in research outputs.