Box 1.

Respect – how to respectfully represent lived experience in research (www.knowyournormal.co.uk).

In the Know Your Normalproject, a team of autistic volunteers from the UK charity Ambitious about Autism approached academics from the Centre for Research in Autism and Education, University College London, to co-produce research on a topic that they identified as a priority issue – mental health in young autistic people. The team worked in partnership to design the study, conduct the research, and analyse and interpret the data, and write-up and disseminate the results; with the academic researchers ensuring that the research was methodologically and ethically sound, and the autistic volunteers ensuring that the research was relevant and meaningful to the autistic community, representing their lived experience (Crane et al., 2018).
Strengths of this approach	Limitations of this approach
● Focus on a priority area for autistic people and involvement of autistic co-researchers facilitated recruitment into the study and engagement with findings ● Autistic co-researchers obtained hands-on experience of conducting a research project to completion	● Autistic researchers limited from data collection due to time constraints and personal relationships with participants ● Relied on an approach from an autistic group to get the project off the ground – project would not have happened without their confidence and resourcefulness