Despite considerable achievement in inclusive research, people with intellectual disabilities have been largely excluded from the critical area of data analysis and theory development. Next to the undoubted complexity of these tasks, this can partly be attributed to higher demands of representativeness that are used to judge the validity of disability research as well as missing training opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. The paper presents data from the first core research project in German-speaking countries that was carried out within an inclusive framework. Within the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) financed project "Experiences of participation in the (vocational) biography of people with intellectual disability" at the Department of Education at the University of Vienna, the research team aimed at involving people with intellectual disability in an accompanying reference group in the process of co-construction of theory through the shared analysis of the collected qualitative data: life stories and narratives of people with intellectual disability. This paper seeks out to show the added value of this approach both methodologically and practically.