The critical role of lived experience reporting guidelines to improve research with young disabled people

Social and public health research has been transformed by the acknowledgment that it should involve the very people it will affect, and lived experience input from disabled people is increasingly common. Although this indicates engagement with disabled people in research is getting better, the reporting of their involvement is not. In this paper, we focus on the intersection of youth and disability, a population that is underrepresented in both disability research and its supporting resources. We argue there is an urgent need for research to clearly document the involvement of young disabled people so we can properly understand the impact of their lived experience. We propose essential reporting criteria that will facilitate research quality by fostering accountability and reproducibility. Without clear reporting guidelines, lived experience input from young disabled people will remain undocumented and its impact overlooked.