How experiences as a research participant inspired an explicit commitment to parents taking part in a doctoral research inquiry

I cannot remember how many research studies I have been involved in over the past 17 years. This is not because I am an established researcher – on the contrary! Rather, it is because my daughter has Down syndrome and even before she could walk or talk, it has been important to our family that we volunteer our time to support researchers who want to improve the lives of disabled people and their families. Therefore, with our parental consent, and her consent since being able to consent herself, my daughter has been observed in multiple studies, such as watching her engage in play or daily tasks, tracking her eye movements when interacting with a computer programme or monitoring her brain waves while watching moving images. I have completed endless surveys and interviews, attended focus groups, and discussed our experiences at length, retelling our ‘story’. I was a mother of a disabled child and a research participant before I started my own ‘becoming-researcher’ journey, and my experiences as parent-participant implicitly shaped my approach to undertaking research throughout. My identities as a doctoral student, research participant and mother are therefore interwoven and cannot be disambiguated (Schriever, 2021). This blog post considers what emerged through the intersection of being a mother, research participant and new doctoral researcher, as my personal experiences as a research participant influenced many of the decisions I took as a doctoral researcher.