The MWAY ‘bridging phase’: what was it like for our young stakeholders?
We just reached the end of our ‘bridging phase’ – an exciting milestone for the MWAY project! This phase was part of our participatory approach, where we work alongside autistic young people and adults to help shape the research questions for the project. In the previous phase, we interviewed autistic young people and their parents to better understand how social and environmental factors can affect mental health for autistic young people. Then, in the bridging phase, we held a series of meetings to discuss the emerging themes from the interviews and, in a collaborative process, turn them into research questions that we will explore in the next phase of the study. The meetings were held with ‘working groups’ that consisted of members of our Adult Stakeholder Advisory Panel (ASAP) and Young Persons Advisory Group (YPAG). We set up three working groups, each focusing on a different topic: school, peer relationships, and family relationships. The bridging phase was a new exper...