members of Hackney People First, with help from Paula Mitchell, PhD student, Open University.This article is written by three people with learning difficulties. It is about our experience of doing research. We are all members of Hackney People First and in 1994 we got involved in a project researching self-advocacy and families. The article describes why we decided to get involved, our feelings about doing research and what we did. It explains the help we had to take part.Researchers have been talking about disabled people doing research for quite some time, but involving people with learning difficulties as researchers is only just beginning. This article is extremely important, as one of the very few times that people with learning difficulties have written about carrying out research.month, first of all to learn about research, and then to talk about what we were researching. We'talked about self-advocacy, families, and what we thought self? advocacy at home should be about. Then we set rules and a plan for the research.We did it in ways that people can understand. A lot of people can't understand writing. The Yellow Brick Road is the first thing we did (see Pictrue 1). Follow the Yellow Brick Road! We've done a lot of talking and Paula wrote what we said and drew pictures. We had words on bits of paper and pulled them out of a hat to talk about them. We stuck up stickers on posters. We've used taperecorders. Picture 1 The Yellow Brick RoadWe are research people. This article is about how we planned a research project. The research is about selfadvocacy and families. It is about people with learning difficulties who live with their families and who are in self-advocacy groups. It is about how families get on and whether people speak up at home. How We StartedWe started in 1994. Paula came to a Hackney People First meeting. She said she had research to do. We had a vote on who wanted to do the research with her.We wanted to take part in t h i s to help ourselves, and to help qthers. We wanted to do research about things that are important to know. Paula thought we would be the proper people to do it so people with learning difficulties can be in control for a change. We know a lot about self-advocacy and families, so we are the experts for this research. We would help Paula think about things differently. She thought it would probably help us as well. What We DidWe can do a lot more than people think we can. We just need help and the chance to try. We had meetings once a