Focusing on empowerment: Facilitating self-help in young people with arthritis through a disability organisation

Young people with arthritis face a number of disabling barriers when negotiating their way through contemporary society. A national disability organisation, Young Arthritis Care (YAC), has established a Contact network, whereby young people with arthritis provide support to similar others in the community. To improve the service, YAC initiated Contact Training Courses in the fields of advocacy and counselling. An appropriate research methodology was required that enabled the efficacy of this training to be examined in a disability framework. Focus group technique was selected as a research methodology set within an emancipatory paradigm that can in itself be an empowering experience for participants. Results illustrated that focus group technique enabled young people with arthritis to freely articulate their views concerning the efficacy of training set within the framework of self-help.