Action Research, Participatory Research, and Other AR Theories

Most social environments adopt a particular culture and management system that remains entrenched, even through turnover cycles, added members, or new leadership. Whether one looks at a particular company’s corporate culture, a community’s sense of identity, or an organization’s management practice, these entrenched habits remains unless the group makes a conscious effort to study, and possibly change, these processes.

Action Research, through a systematic, reflective study of member’s actions and the effects of these actions in a workplace context, is a method for studying these processes. Improvement in the strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within a workplace, research institution, or other large organization result from this inquiry process.

The basic mechanism is iterative: reflective cycles of analyzing actions and their resulting reactions allow researchers to develop a form of “adaptive” expertise, by:

• Examining work habits and looking for opportunities to improve
• Seeking evidence from multiple sources to help them analyze reactions to the action taken.
• Developing, over time, a deep understanding of how forces interact to create series of complex patterns.
• Recognizing their own view as subjective and seeking to develop their understanding of the events from multiple perspectives.

Since the forces change with each stage of the cycle, action research is a process of living one’s theory into practice.

Action research challenges traditional social science, for it seeks knowledge acquisition and theorizing in the midst of the unfolding structure of events. Variable sampling by outside experts removed from the process has no place in Action Research by its very nature. This presents its own set of challenges, namely a continual redefining of goals and conclusions which creates tensions, such as those between:

1. those more driven by the researcher’s agenda to those more driven by participants;
2. those motivated primarily by instrumental goal attainment to those motivated primarily by the aim of personal, organizational, or societal transformation; and
3. 1st-, to 2nd-, to 3rd-person research, that is, my research on my own action, aimed primarily at personal change; our research on our group (family/team), aimed primarily at improving the group; and ‘scholarly’ research aimed primarily at theoretical generalization and/or large scale change.

Goals of Action Research include:

• The improvement of practice through continual learning and progressive problem solving
• A deep understanding of practice and the development of a well specified theory of action
• An improvement in the community in which your practice is embedded through participatory research

Sources:

Centre for Collaborative Action Research

Torbert, W. 1991. The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry