Lived Experience Involvement

We strongly believe in the importance of including individuals with lived domestic abuse and mental health experience in this project, to have a ‘lay’ voice throughout the project and increase the value, integrity and quality of the research. Therefore, in initially developing our ideas about this research project, we spoke to a number of survivors who helped us shape our research. Ultimately, this strengthened the research bid and we are very thankful for their input.

We believe that it is important to amplify the voices of survivors and as such, we have involved a number of previous survivors as ‘experts by experience’ to support the delivery of this project. Our lived experience group will provide their input across the project, advising on what’s important to service-users, helping in the development of project service-user facing materials, data analysis, synthesis and framework development, report writing (for service-users/lay person), and dissemination.

In short, we believe it is important that our lived experience group are integrated into the central working of the project, so that we can shape our research in a way that is survivor-focussed and co-produced with survivors. As we develop our project, we will share testimonials from our lived experience group about their involvement with the project.