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What is Action Research?

Action research involves a systematic process of examining the evidence. The results of this type of research are practical, relevant, and can inform theory. Action research is different than other forms of research as there is less concern for universality of findings, and more value is placed on the relevance of the findings to the researcher and the local collaborators.

Riel, M. (2020). Understanding action research. Center For Collaborative Action Research, Pepperdine University. Retrieved January 31, 2021 from the Center for Collaborative Action Research. https://www.actionresearchtutorials.org/

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The short video below by John Spencer provides a quick overview of Action Research.

How is Action Research different?

This chart demonstrates the difference between traditional research and action research. Traditional research is a means to an end - the conclusion. They start with a theory, statistical analysis is critical and the researcher does not insert herself into the research.

Action research is often practiced by practitioners like teachers and librarians who remain in the middle of the research process. They are looking for ways to improve the specific situation for their clientele or students. Statistics may be collected but they are not the point of the research.

Adapted from: Mc Millan, J. H. & Wergin. J. F. (1998). Understanding and evaluating educational research. Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Teacher Action Research

According to Paul Gorski, Action Research for educators meets the following qualifications:

a non-traditional and community-based form of educational evaluation;
carried out by educators, not outside researchers or evaluators;
focused on improving teaching and learning, but also social and environmental factors that affect the nature and success of teaching and learning;
formative, not summative--an on-going process of evaluation, recommendation, practice, reflection, and reevaluation; and
change-oriented, and undertaken with the assumption that change is needed in a given context

Gorski, P. C. (1995-2018). Teacher Action Research . Critical Multicultural Pavilion. Retrieved October 6, 2018 from https://www.edchange.org/multicultural/tar.html

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What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples

What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples

Published on 27 January 2023 by Tegan George . Revised on 21 April 2023.

Types of action research, action research models, examples of action research, action research vs. traditional research, advantages and disadvantages of action research, frequently asked questions about action research.

There are 2 common types of action research: participatory action research and practical action research.

Participatory action research emphasises that participants should be members of the community being studied, empowering those directly affected by outcomes of said research. In this method, participants are effectively co-researchers, with their lived experiences considered formative to the research process.
Practical action research focuses more on how research is conducted and is designed to address and solve specific issues.

Both types of action research are more focused on increasing the capacity and ability of future practitioners than contributing to a theoretical body of knowledge.

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Action research is often reflected in 3 action research models: operational (sometimes called technical), collaboration, and critical reflection.

Operational (or technical) action research is usually visualised like a spiral following a series of steps, such as “planning → acting → observing → reflecting.”
Collaboration action research is more community-based, focused on building a network of similar individuals (e.g., college professors in a given geographic area) and compiling learnings from iterated feedback cycles.
Critical reflection action research serves to contextualise systemic processes that are already ongoing (e.g., working retroactively to analyse existing school systems by questioning why certain practices were put into place and developed the way they did).

Action research is often used in fields like education because of its iterative and flexible style.

After the information was collected, the students were asked where they thought ramps or other accessibility measures would be best utilised, and the suggestions were sent to school administrators. Example: Practical action research Science teachers at your city’s high school have been witnessing a year-over-year decline in standardised test scores in chemistry. In seeking the source of this issue, they studied how concepts are taught in depth, focusing on the methods, tools, and approaches used by each teacher.

Action research differs sharply from other types of research in that it seeks to produce actionable processes over the course of the research rather than contributing to existing knowledge or drawing conclusions from datasets. In this way, action research is formative , not summative , and is conducted in an ongoing, iterative way.

As such, action research is different in purpose, context, and significance and is a good fit for those seeking to implement systemic change.

Action research comes with advantages and disadvantages.

Action research is highly adaptable , allowing researchers to mould their analysis to their individual needs and implement practical individual-level changes.
Action research provides an immediate and actionable path forward for solving entrenched issues, rather than suggesting complicated, longer-term solutions rooted in complex data.
Done correctly, action research can be very empowering , informing social change and allowing participants to effect that change in ways meaningful to their communities.

Disadvantages

Due to their flexibility, action research studies are plagued by very limited generalisability and are very difficult to replicate . They are often not considered theoretically rigorous due to the power the researcher holds in drawing conclusions.
Action research can be complicated to structure in an ethical manner . Participants may feel pressured to participate or to participate in a certain way.
Action research is at high risk for research biases such as selection bias , social desirability bias , or other types of cognitive biases .

Action research is conducted in order to solve a particular issue immediately, while case studies are often conducted over a longer period of time and focus more on observing and analyzing a particular ongoing phenomenon.

Action research is focused on solving a problem or informing individual and community-based knowledge in a way that impacts teaching, learning, and other related processes. It is less focused on contributing theoretical input, instead producing actionable input.

Action research is particularly popular with educators as a form of systematic inquiry because it prioritizes reflection and bridges the gap between theory and practice. Educators are able to simultaneously investigate an issue as they solve it, and the method is very iterative and flexible.

A cycle of inquiry is another name for action research . It is usually visualized in a spiral shape following a series of steps, such as “planning → acting → observing → reflecting.”

Sources for this article

We strongly encourage students to use sources in their work. You can cite our article (APA Style) or take a deep dive into the articles below.

George, T. (2023, April 21). What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 14 May 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/research-methods/action-research-cycle/

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2017). Research methods in education (8th edition). Routledge.

Naughton, G. M. (2001). Action research (1st edition). Routledge.

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Introduction: What Is Action Research?

First Online: 07 June 2023

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Martin Dege 3

Part of the book series: Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences ((THHSS))

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Gives a brief overview of the concepts, traditions, and theoretical underpinnings of action research. Provides first attempts at defining the field and shows conceptual problems and pitfalls within the action research traditions. Shows how Critical Psychology intercepts with Action Research.

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Fals Borda, O., & Rahman, M. A. (Eds.). (1991). Action and knowledge: Breaking the monopoly with participatory action research . Apex.

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Greenwood, D., & Levin, M. (2007). Introduction to action research: Social research for social change (2nd ed.). Sage.

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Habermas, J. (1978). Einige Schwierigkeiten beim Versuch, Theorie und Praxis zu vermitteln. In Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien (pp. 9–47). Suhrkamp.

Johansson, A. W., & Lindhult, E. (2008). Emancipation or workability?: Critical versus pragmatic scientific orientation in action research. Action Research, 6 (1), 95–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750307083713

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Kapoor, I. (2002). The devil’s in the theory: A critical assessment of Robert Chambers’ work on participatory development. Third World Quarterly, 23 (1), 101–117. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=5801768&site=ehost-live

Markard, M. (1991). Methodik subjektwissenschaftlicher Forschung: Jenseits des Streits um quantitative und qualitative Verfahren . Argument Verlag.

Markard, M. (2009). Einführung in die Kritische Psychologie: Grundlagen, Methoden und Problemfelder marxistischer Subjektwissenschaft . Argument Verlag.

Marx, K., Engels, F., & Harvey, D. (2008). The communist manifesto (S. Moore, Trans.). Pluto Press. (Original work published in 1848).

Moser, H. (1978). Einige Aspekte der Aktionsforschung im internationalen Vergleich. In H. Moser & H. Ornauer (Eds.), Internationale Aspekte der Aktionsforschung (pp. 173–189). Kösel.

Tolman, C. W. (1994). Psychology, society, and subjectivity: An introduction to German critical psychology . Routledge.

Whyte, W.F. (1991). Participatory action research . Sage.

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Action research

A type of applied research designed to find the most effective way to bring about a desired social change or to solve a practical problem, usually in collaboration with those being researched.

SAGE Research Methods Videos

How do you define action research.

Professor David Coghlan explains action research as an approach that crosses many academic disciplines yet has a shared focus on taking action to address a problem. He describes the difference between this approach and empirical scientific approaches, particularly highlighting the challenge of getting action research to be taken seriously by academic journals

Dr. Nataliya Ivankova defines action research as using systematic research principles to address an issue in everyday life. She delineates the six steps of action research, and illustrates the concept using an anti-diabetes project in an urban area.

This is just one segment in a whole series about action research. You can find the rest of the series in our SAGE database, Research Methods:

Videos covering research methods and statistics

Article contents

Action research.

Eileen S. Johnson Eileen S. Johnson Oakland University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.696
Published online: 29 May 2020

Action research has become a common practice among educational administrators. The term “action research” was first coined by Kurt Lewin in the 1930s, although teachers and school administrators have long engaged in the process described by and formally named by Lewin. Alternatively known as practitioner research, self-study, action science, site-based inquiry, emancipatory praxis, etc., action research is essentially a collaborative, democratic, and participatory approach to systematic inquiry into a problem of practice within a local context. Action research has become prevalent in many fields and disciplines, including education, health sciences, nursing, social work, and anthropology. This prevalence can be understood in the way action research lends itself to action-based inquiry, participation, collaboration, and the development of solutions to problems of everyday practice in local contexts. In particular, action research has become commonplace in educational administration preparation programs due to its alignment and natural fit with the nature of education and the decision making and action planning necessary within local school contexts. Although there is not one prescribed way to engage in action research, and there are multiple approaches to action research, it generally follows a systematic and cyclical pattern of reflection, planning, action, observation, and data collection, evaluation that then repeats in an iterative and ongoing manner. The goal of action research is not to add to a general body of knowledge but, rather, to inform local practice, engage in professional learning, build a community practice, solve a problem or understand a process or phenomenon within a particular context, or empower participants to generate self-knowledge.

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Published: 27 April 2023

Participatory action research

Flora Cornish ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3404-9385 1 ,
Nancy Breton ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8388-0458 1 ,
Ulises Moreno-Tabarez ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3504-8624 2 ,
Jenna Delgado 3 ,
Mohi Rua 4 ,
Ama de-Graft Aikins 5 &
Darrin Hodgetts 6

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume 3 , Article number: 34 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Communication
Developing world

Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives. PAR involves the participation and leadership of those people experiencing issues, who take action to produce emancipatory social change, through conducting systematic research to generate new knowledge. This Primer sets out key considerations for the design of a PAR project. The core of the Primer introduces six building blocks for PAR project design: building relationships; establishing working practices; establishing a common understanding of the issue; observing, gathering and generating materials; collaborative analysis; and planning and taking action. We discuss key challenges faced by PAR projects, namely, mismatches with institutional research infrastructure; risks of co-option; power inequalities; and the decentralizing of control. To counter such challenges, PAR researchers may build PAR-friendly networks of people and infrastructures; cultivate a critical community to hold them to account; use critical reflexivity; redistribute powers; and learn to trust the process. PAR’s societal contribution and methodological development, we argue, can best be advanced by engaging with contemporary social movements that demand the redressingl of inequities and the recognition of situated expertise.

Mapping the community: use of research evidence in policy and practice

Negotiating the ethical-political dimensions of research methods: a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research

Structured output methods and environmental issues: perspectives on co-created bottom-up and ‘sideways’ science

Introduction.

For the authors of this Primer, participatory action research (PAR) is a scholar–activist research approach that brings together community members, activists and scholars to co-create knowledge and social change in tandem 1 , 2 . PAR is a collaborative, iterative, often open-ended and unpredictable endeavour, which prioritizes the expertise of those experiencing a social issue and uses systematic research methodologies to generate new insights. Relationships are central. PAR typically involves collaboration between a community with lived experience of a social issue and professional researchers, often based in universities, who contribute relevant knowledge, skills, resources and networks. PAR is not a research process driven by the imperative to generate knowledge for scientific progress, or knowledge for knowledge’s sake; it is a process for generating knowledge-for-action and knowledge-through-action, in service of goals of specific communities. The position of a PAR scholar is not easy and is constantly tested, as PAR projects and roles straddle university and community boundaries, involving unequal power relations and multiple, sometimes conflicting interests. This Primer aims to support researchers in preparing a PAR project, by providing a scaffold to navigate the processes through which PAR can help us to collaboratively envisage and enact emancipatory futures.

We consider PAR an emancipatory form of scholarship 1 . Emancipatory scholarship is driven by interest in tackling injustices and building futures supportive of human thriving, rather than objectivity and neutrality. It uses research not primarily to communicate with academic experts but to inform grassroots collective action. Many users of PAR aspire to projects of liberation and/or transformation . Users are likely to be critical of research that perpetuates oppressive power relations, whether within the research relationships themselves or in a project’s messages or outcomes, often aiming to trouble or transform power relations. PAR projects are usually concerned with developments not only in knowledge but also in action and in participants’ capacities, capabilities and performances.

PAR does not follow a set research design or particular methodology, but constitutes a strategic rallying point for collaborative, impactful, contextually situated and inclusive efforts to document, interpret and address complex systemic problems 3 . The development of PAR is a product of intellectual and activist work bridging universities and communities, with separate genealogies in several Indigenous 4 , 5 , Latin American 6 , 7 , Indian 8 , African 9 , Black feminist 10 , 11 and Euro-American 12 , 13 traditions.

PAR, as an authoritative form of enquiry, became established during the 1970s and 1980s in the context of anti-colonial movements in the Global South. As anti-colonial movements worked to overthrow territorial and economic domination, they also strived to overthrow symbolic and epistemic injustices , ousting the authority of Western science to author knowledge about dominated peoples 4 , 14 . For Indigenous scholars, the development of PAR approaches often comprised an extension of Indigenous traditions of knowledge production that value inclusion and community engagement, while enabling explicit engagements with matters of power, domination and representation 15 . At the same time, exchanges between Latin American and Indian popular education movements produced Orlando Fals Borda’s articulation of PAR as a paradigm in the 1980s. This orientation prioritized people’s participation in producing knowledge, instead of the positioning of local populations as the subject of knowledge production practices imposed by outside experts 16 . Meanwhile, PAR appealed to those inspired by Black and postcolonial feminists who challenged established knowledge hierarchies, arguing for the wisdom of people marginalized by centres of power, who, in the process of survivance, that is, surviving and resisting oppressive social structures, came to know and deconstruct those structures acutely 17 , 18 .

Some Euro-American approaches to PAR are less transformational and more reformist, in the action research paradigm, as developed by Kurt Lewin 19 to enhance organizational efficacy during and after World War II. Action research later gained currency as a popular approach for professionals such as teachers and nurses to develop their own practices, and it tended to focus on relatively small-scale adjustments within a given institutional structure, instead of challenging power relations as in anti-colonial PAR 13 , 20 . In the late twentieth century, participatory research gained currency in academic fields such as participatory development 21 , 22 , participatory health promotion 23 and creative methods 24 . Although participatory research includes participants in the conceptualization, design and conduct of a project, it may not prioritize action and social change to the extent that PAR does. In the early twenty-first century, the development of PAR is occurring through sustained scholarly engagements in anti-colonial 5 , 25 , abolitionist 26 , anti-racist 27 , 28 , gender-expansive 29 , climate activist 30 and other radical social movements.

This Primer bridges these traditions by looking across them for mutual learning but avoiding assimilating them. We hope that readers will bring their own activist and intellectual heritages to inform their use of PAR and adapt and adjust the suggestions we present to meet their needs.

Four key principles

Drawing across its diverse origins, we characterize PAR by four key principles. The first is the authority of direct experience. PAR values the expertise generated through experience, claiming that those who have been marginalized or harmed by current social relations have deep experiential knowledge of those systems and deserve to own and lead initiatives to change them 3 , 5 , 17 , 18 . The second is knowledge in action. Following the tradition of action research, it is through learning from the experience of making changes that PAR generates new knowledge 13 . The third key principle is research as a transformative process. For PAR, the research process is as important as the outcomes; projects aim to create empowering relationships and environments within the research process itself 31 . The final key principle is collaboration through dialogue. PAR’s power comes from harnessing the diverse sets of expertise and capacities of its collaborators through critical dialogues 7 , 8 , 32 .

Because PAR is often unfamiliar, misconstrued or mistrusted by dominant scientific 33 institutions, PAR practitioners may find themselves drawn into competitions and debates set on others’ terms, or into projects interested in securing communities’ participation but not their emancipation. Engaging communities and participants in participatory exercises for the primary purpose of advancing research aims prioritized by a university or others is not, we contend, PAR. We encourage PAR teams to articulate their intellectual and political heritage and aspirations, and agree their core principles, to which they can hold themselves accountable. Such agreements can serve as anchors for decision-making or counterweights to the pull towards inegalitarian or extractive research practices.

Aims of the Primer

The contents of the Primer are shaped by the authors’ commitment to emancipatory, engaged scholarship, and their own experience of PAR, stemming from their scholar-activism with marginalized communities to tackle issues including state neglect, impoverishment, infectious and non-communicable disease epidemics, homelessness, sexual violence, eviction, pollution, dispossession and post-disaster recovery. Collectively, our understanding of PAR is rooted in Indigenous, Black feminist and emancipatory education traditions and diverse personal experiences of privilege and marginalization across dimensions of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability. We use an inclusive understanding of PAR, to include engaging, emancipatory work that does not necessarily use the term PAR, and we aim to showcase some of the diversity of scholar-activism around the globe. The contents of this Primer are suggestions and reflections based on our own experience of PAR and of teaching research methodology. There are multiple ways of conceptualizing and conducting a PAR project. As context-sensitive social change processes, every project will pose new challenges.

This Primer is addressed primarily to university-based PAR researchers, who are likely to work in collaboration with members of communities or organizations or with activists, and are accountable to academic audiences as well as to community audiences. Much expertise in PAR originates outside universities, in community groups and organizations, from whom scholars have much to learn. The Primer aims to familiarize scholars new to PAR and others who may benefit with PAR’s key principles, decision points, practices, challenges, dilemmas, optimizations, limitations and work-arounds. Readers will be able to use our framework of ‘building blocks’ as a guide to designing their projects. We aim to support critical thinking about the challenges of PAR to enable readers to problem-solve independently. The Primer aims to inspire with examples, which we intersperse throughout. To illustrate some of the variety of positive achievements of PAR projects, Box 1 presents three examples.

Box 1 What does participatory action research do?

The Tsui Anaa Project 60 in Accra, Ghana, began as a series of interviews about diabetes experiences in one of Accra’s oldest indigenous communities, Ga Mashie. Over a 12-year period, a team of interdisciplinary researchers expanded the project to a multi-method engagement with a wide range of community members. University and community co-researchers worked to diagnose the burden of chronic conditions, to develop psychosocial interventions for cardiovascular and associated conditions and to critically reflect on long-term goals. A health support group of people living with diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, called Jamestown Health Club (JTHC), was formed, met monthly and contributed as patient advocates to community, city and national non-communicable disease policy. The project has supported graduate collaborators with mixed methods training, community engagement and postgraduate theses advancing the core project purposes.

Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 were approached by members of the Katkari tribal community in Maharashtra, India, who were concerned about landlords erecting fences around their villages. Using their institutional networks, the academics investigated the villagers’ legal rights to secure tenure and facilitated a series of participatory investigations, through which Katkari villagers developed their own understanding of the inequalities they faced and analysed potential action strategies. Subsequently, through legal challenges, engagement with local politics and emboldened local communities, more than 100 Katkari communities were more secure and better organized 5 years later.

The Morris Justice Project 74 in New York, USA, sought to address stop-and-frisk policing in a neighbourhood local to the City University of New York, where a predominantly Black population was subject to disproportionate and aggressive policing. Local residents surveyed their neighbours to gather evidence on experiences of stop and frisk, compiling their statistics and experiences and sharing them with the local community on the sidewalk, projecting their findings onto public buildings and joining a coalition ‘Communities United for Police Reform’, which successfully campaigned for changes to the city’s policing laws.

Experimentation

This section sets out the core considerations for designing a PAR project.

Owing to the intricacies of working within complex human systems in real time, PAR practitioners do not follow a highly proceduralized or linear set of steps 34 . In a cyclical process, teams work together to come to an initial definition of their social problem, design a suitable action, observe and gather information on the results, and then analyse and reflect on the action and its impact, in order to learn, modify their understanding and inform the next iteration of the research–action cycle 3 , 35 (Fig. 1 ). Teams remain open throughout the cycle to repeating or revising earlier steps in response to developments in the field. The fundamental process of building relationships occurs throughout the cycles. These spiral diagrams orient readers towards the central interdependence of processes of participation, action and research and the nonlinear, iterative process of learning by doing 3 , 36 .

Participatory action research develops through a series of cycles, with relationship building as a constant practice. Cycles of research text adapted from ref. 81 , and figure adapted with permission from ref. 82 , SAGE.

Building blocks for PAR research design

We present six building blocks to set out the key design considerations for conducting a PAR project. Each PAR team may address these building blocks in different ways and with different priorities. Table 1 proposes potential questions and indicative goals that are possible markers of progress for each building block. They are not prescriptive or exhaustive but may be a useful starting point, with examples, to prompt new PAR teams’ planning.

Building relationships

‘Relationships first, research second’ is our key principle for PAR project design 37 . Collaborative relationships usually extend beyond a particular PAR project, and it is rare that one PAR project finalizes a desired change. A researcher parachuting in and out may be able to complete a research article, with community cooperation, but will not be able to see through the hard graft of a programme of participatory research towards social change. Hence, individual PAR projects are often nested in long-term collaborations. Such collaborations are strengthened by institutional backing in the form of sustainable staff appointments, formal recognition of the value of university–community partnerships and provision of administrative support. In such a supportive context, opportunities can be created for achievable shorter-term projects to which collaborators or temporary researchers may contribute. The first step of PAR is sometimes described as the entry, but we term this foundational step building relationships to emphasize the longer-term nature of these relationships and their constitutive role throughout a project. PAR scholars may need to work hard with and against their institutions to protect those relationships, monitoring potential collaborations for community benefit rather than knowledge and resource extraction. Trustworthy relationships depend upon scholars being aware, open and honest about their own interests and perspectives.

The motivation for a PAR project may come from university-based or community-based researchers. When university researchers already have a relationship with marginalized communities, they may be approached by community leaders initiating a collaboration 38 , 39 . Alternatively, a university-based researcher may reach out to representatives of communities facing evident problems, to explore common interests and the potential for collaboration 40 . As Indigenous scholars have articulated, communities that have been treated as the subjects or passive objects of research, commodified for the scientific knowledge of distant elites, are suspicious of research and researchers 4 , 41 . Scholars need to be able to satisfy communities’ key questions: Who are you? Why should we trust you? What is in it for our community? Qualifications, scholarly achievements or verbal reassurances are less relevant in this context than past or present valued contributions, participation in a heritage of transformational action or evidence of solidarity with a community’s causes. Being vouched for by a respected community member or collaborator can be invaluable.

Without prior relationships one can start cold, as a stranger, perhaps attending public events, informal meeting places or identifying organizations in which the topic is of interest, and introducing oneself. Strong collaborative relationships are based on mutual trust, which must be earned. It is important to be transparent about our interests and to resist the temptation to over-promise. Good PAR practitioners do not raise unrealistic expectations. Box 2 presents key soft skills for PAR researchers.

Positionality is crucial to PAR relationships. A university-based researcher’s positionalities (including, for example, their gender, race, ethnicity, class, politics, skills, age, life stage, life experiences, assumptions about the problem, experience in research, activism and relationship to the topic) interact with the positionalities of community co-researchers, shaping the collective definition of the problem and appropriate solutions. Positionalities are not fixed, but can be changing, multiple and even contradictory 42 . We have framed categories of university-based and community-based researchers here, but in practice these positionings of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ are often more complex and shifting 43 . Consideration of diversity is important when building a team to avoid tokenism . For example, identifying which perspectives are included initially and why, and whether members of the team or gatekeepers have privileged access owing to their race, ethnicity, class, gender and/or able-bodiedness.

The centring of community expertise in PAR does not mean that a community is ‘taken for granted’. Communities are sites of the production of similarity and difference, equality and inequalities, and politics. Knowledge that has the status of common sense may itself reproduce inequalities or perpetuate harm. Relatedly, strong PAR projects cultivate reflexivity 44 among both university-based and community-based researchers, to enable a critical engagement with the diversity of points of view, positions of power and stakes in a project. Developing reflexivity may be uncomfortable and challenging, and good PAR projects create a supportive culture for processing such discomfort. Supplementary files 1 and 2 present example exercises that build critical reflexivity.

Box 2 Soft skills of a participatory action researcher

Respect for others’ knowledge and the expertise of experience

Humility and genuine kindness

Ability to be comfortable with discomfort

Sharing power; ceding control

Trusting the process

Acceptance of uncertainty and tensions

Openness to learning from collaborators

Self-awareness and the ability to listen and be confronted

Willingness to take responsibility and to be held accountable

Confidence to identify and challenge power relations

Establishing working practices

Partnerships bring together people with different sets of norms, assumptions, interests, resources, time frames and working practices, all nested in institutional structures and infrastructures that cement those assumptions. University-based researchers often take their own working practices for granted, but partnership working calls for negotiation. Academics often work with very extended time frames for analysis, writing and review before publication, hoping to contribute to gradually shifting agendas, discourses and politics 45 . The urgency of problems that face a community often calls for faster responsiveness. Research and management practices that are normal in a university may not be accessible to people historically marginalized through dimensions that include disability, language, racialization, gender, literacy practices and their intersections 46 . Disrupting historically entrenched power dynamics associated with these concerns can raise discomfort and calls for skilful negotiation. In short, partnership working is a complex art, calling for thoughtful design of joint working practices and a willingness to invest the necessary time.

Making working practices and areas of tension explicit is one useful starting point. Not all issues need to be fully set out and decided at the outset of a project. A foundation of trust, through building relationships in building block 1, allows work to move ahead without every element being pinned down in advance. Supplementary file 1 presents an exercise designed to build working relationships and communicative practices.

Establishing a common understanding of the issue

Co-researchers identify a common issue or problem to address. University-based researchers tend to justify the selection of the research topic with reference to a literature review, whereas in PAR, the topic must be a priority for the community. Problem definition is a key step for PAR teams, where problem does not necessarily mean something negative or a deficit, but refers to the identification of an important issue at stake for a community. The definition of a problem, however, is not always self-evident, and producing a problem definition can be a valid outcome of PAR. In the example of risks of eviction from Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 (Box 1 ), a small number of Katkari people first experienced the problem in terms of landlords erecting barbed wire fences. Other villages did not perceive the risk of eviction as a big problem compared with their other needs. Facilitating dialogues across villages about their felt problems revealed how land tenure was at the root of several issues, thus mobilizing interest. Problem definitions are political; they imply some forms of action and not others. Discussion and reflexivity about the problem definition are crucial. Compared with other methodologies, the PAR research process is much more public from the outset, and so practices of making key steps explicit, shareable, communicable and negotiable are essential. Supplementary file 3 introduces two participatory tools for collective problem definition.

Consideration of who should be involved in problem definition is important. It may be enough that a small project team works closely together at this stage. Alternatively, group or public meetings may be held, with careful facilitation 5 . Out of dialogue, a PAR team aims to agree on an actionable problem definition, responding to the team’s combination of skills, capacities and priorities. A PAR scholar works across the university–community boundary and thus is accountable to both university values and grassroots communities’ values. PAR scholars should not deny or hide the multiple demands of the role because communities with experience of marginalization are attuned to being manipulated. Surfacing interests and constraints and discussing these reflexively is often a better strategy. Creativity may be required to design projects that meet both academic goals (such as when a project is funded to produce certain outcomes) and the community’s goals.

For example, in the context of a PAR project with residents of a public housing neighbourhood scheduled for demolition and redevelopment, Thurber and colleagues 47 describe how they overcame differences between resident and academic researchers regarding the purposes of their initial survey. The academic team members preferred the data to be anonymous, to maximize the scientific legitimacy of their project (considered valuable for their credibility to policymakers), whereas the resident team wanted to use the opportunity to recruit residents to their cause, by collecting contact details. The team discussed their different objectives and produced the solution of two-person survey teams, one person gathering anonymous data for the research and a second person gathering contact details for the campaign’s contact list.

Articulating research questions is an early milestone. PAR questions prioritize community concerns, so they may differ from academic-driven research questions. For example, Buckles, Khedkar and Ghevde 39 facilitated a participatory process that developed questions along the lines of: What are the impacts of not having a land title for Katkari people? How will stakeholders respond to Katkari organizing, and what steps can Katkari communities take towards the goal of securing tenure? In another case, incarcerated women in New York state, USA, invited university academics to evaluate a local college in prison in the interest of building an empirical argument for the value of educational opportunities in prisons 38 , 48 Like other evaluations, it asked: “What is the impact of college on women in prison?” But instead of looking narrowly at the impact on re-offending as the relevant impact (as prioritized by politicians and policymakers), based on the incarcerated women’s advice, the evaluation tracked other outcomes: women’s well-being within the prison; their relationships with each other and the staff; their children; their sense of achievement; and their agency in their lives after incarceration.

As a PAR project develops, the problem definition and research questions are often refined through the iterative cycles. This evolution does not undermine the value of writing problem definitions and research questions in the early stages, as a collaboration benefits from having a common reference point to build from and from which to negotiate.

Observing, gathering and generating materials

With a common understanding of the problem, PAR teams design ways of observing the details and workings of this problem. PAR is not prescriptive about the methods used to gather or generate observations. Projects often use qualitative methods, such as storytelling, interviewing or ethnography, or participatory methods, such as body mapping, problem trees, guided walks, timelines, diaries, participatory photography and video or participatory theatre. Gathering quantitative data is an option, particularly in the tradition of participatory statistics 49 . Chilisa 5 distinguishes sources of spatial data, time-related data, social data and technical data. The selected methods should be engaging to the community and the co-researchers, suited to answering the research questions and supported by available professional skills. Means of recording the process or products, and of storing those records, need to be agreed, as well as ethical principles. Developing community members’ research skills for data collection and analysis can be a valued contribution to a PAR project, potentially generating longer-term capacities for local research and change-making 50 .

Our selection of data generation methods and their details depends upon the questions we ask. In some cases, methods to explore problem definitions and then to brainstorm potential actions, their risks and benefits will be useful (Supplementary file 3 ). Others may be less prescriptive about problems and solutions, seeking to explore experience in an open-ended way, as a basis for generating new understandings (see Supplementary file 2 for an example reflective participatory exercise).

Less-experienced practitioners may take a naive approach to PAR, which assumes that knowledge should emerge solely from an authentic community devoid of outside ideas. More established PAR researchers, however, work consciously to combine and exchange skills and knowledge through dialogue. Together with communities, we want to produce effective products, and we recognize that doing so may require specific skills. In Marzi’s 51 participatory video project with migrant women in Colombia, she engaged professional film-makers to provide the women with training in filming, editing and professional film production vocabulary. The women were given the role of directors, with the decision-making power over what to include and exclude in their film. In a Photovoice project with Black and Indigenous youth in Toronto, Canada, Tuck and Habtom 25 drew on their prior scholar–activist experience and their critical analysis of scholarship of marginalization, which often uses tropes of victimhood, passivity and sadness. Instead of repeating narratives of damage, they intended to encourage desire-based narratives. They supported their young participants to critically consider which photographs they wanted to include or exclude from public representations. Training participants to be expert users of research techniques does not devalue their existing expertise and skills, but takes seriously their role in co-producing valid, critical knowledge. University-based researchers equally benefit from training in facilitation methods, team development and the history and context of the community.

Data generation is relational, mediated by the positionalities of the researchers involved. As such, researchers position themselves across boundaries, and need to have, or to develop, skills in interpreting across boundaries. In the Tsui Anaa Project (Box 1 ) in Ghana, the project recruited Ga-speaking graduate students as researchers; Ga is the language most widely spoken in the community. The students were recruited not only for their language skills, but also for their Ga cultural sensibilities, reflected in their sense of humour and their intergenerational communicative styles, enabling fluid communication and mutual understanding with the community. In turn, two community representatives were recruited as advocates to represent patient perspectives across university and community boundaries.

University-based researchers trained in methodological rigour may need reminders that the process of a PAR project is as important as the outcome, and is part of the outcome. Facilitation skills are the most crucial skills for PAR practitioners at this stage. Productive facilitation skills encourage open conversation and collective understandings of the problem at hand and how to address it. More specifically, good facilitation requires a sensitivity to the ongoing and competing social context, such as power relations, within the group to help shift power imbalances and enable participation by all 52 . Box 3 presents a PAR project that exemplifies the importance of relationship building in a community arts project.

Box 3 Case study of the BRIDGE Project: relationship building and collective art making as social change

The BRIDGE Project was a 3-week long mosaic-making and dialogue programme for youth aged 14–18 years, in Southern California. For several summers, the project brought together students from different campuses to discuss inclusion, bullying and community. The goal was to help build enduring relationships among young people who otherwise would not have met or interacted, thereby mitigating the racial tensions that existed in their local high schools.

Youth were taught how to make broken tile mosaic artworks, facilitated through community-building exercises. After the first days, as relationships grew, so did the riskiness of the discussion topics. Youth explored ideas and beliefs that contribute to one’s individual sense of identity, followed by discussion of wider social identities around race, class, sex, gender, class, sexual orientation and finally their identities in relationship to others.

The art-making process was structured in a manner that mirrored the building of their relationships. Youth learned mosaic-making skills while creating individual pieces. They were discouraged from collaborating with anyone else until after the individual pieces were completed and they had achieved some proficiency. When discussions transitioned to focus on the relationship their identities had to each other, the facilitators assisted them in creating collaborative mosaics with small groups.

Staff facilitation modelled the relationship-building goal of the project. The collaborative art making was built upon the rule that no one could make any changes without asking for and receiving permission from the person or people who had placed the piece (or pieces) down. To encourage participants to engage with each other it was vital that they each felt comfortable to voice their opinions while simultaneously learning how to be accountable to their collaborators and respectful of others’ relationships to the art making.

The process culminated in the collective creation of a tile mosaic wall mural, which is permanently installed in the host site.

Collaborative analysis

In PAR projects, data collection and analysis are not typically isolated to different phases of research. Instead, a tried and tested approach to collaborative analysis 53 is to use generated data as a basis for reflection on commonalities, patterns, differences, underlying causes or potentials on an ongoing basis. For instance, body mapping, photography, or video projects often proceed through a series of workshops, with small-scale training–data collection–data analysis cycles in each workshop. Participants gather or produce materials in response to a prompt, and then come together to critically discuss the meaning of their productions.

Simultaneously, or later, a more formal data analysis may be employed, using established social science analytical tools such as grounded theory, thematic, content or discourse analysis, or other forms of visual or ethnographic analysis, with options for facilitated co-researcher involvement. The selection of a specific orientation or approach to analysis is often a low priority for community-based co-researchers. It may be appropriate for university-based researchers to take the lead on comprehensive analysis and the derivation of initial messages. Fine and Torre 29 describe the university-based researchers producing a “best bad draft” so that there is something on the table to react to and discuss. Given the multiple iterations of participants’ expressions of experiences and analyses by this stage, the university-based researchers should be in a position that their best bad draft is grounded in a good understanding of local perspectives and should not appear outlandish, one-sided or an imposition of outside ideas.

For the results and recommendations to reflect community interests, it is important to incorporate a step whereby community representatives can critically examine and contribute to emerging findings and core messages for the public, stakeholders or academic audiences.

Planning and taking action

Taking action is an integral part of a PAR process. What counts as action and change is different for each PAR project. Actions could be targeted at a wide range of scales and different stakeholders, with differing intended outcomes. Valid intended outcomes include creating supportive networks to share resources through mutual aid; empowering participants through sharing experiences and making sense of them collectively; using the emotional impact of artistic works to influence policymakers and journalists; mobilizing collective action to build community power; forging a coalition with other activist and advocacy groups; and many others. Selection between the options depends on underlying priorities, values, theories of how social change happens and, crucially, feasibility.

Articulating a theory of change is one way to demonstrate how we intend to bring about changes through designing an action plan. A theory of change identifies an action and a mechanism, directed at producing outcomes, for a target group, in a context. This device has often been used in donor-driven health and development contexts in a rather prescriptive way, but PAR teams can adapt the tool as a scaffolding for being explicit about action plans and as a basis for further discussions and development of those plans. Many health and development organizations (such as Better Evaluation ) have frameworks to help design a theory of change.

Alternatively, a community action plan 5 can serve as a tangible roadmap to produce change, by setting out objectives, strategies, timeline, key actors, required resources and the monitoring and evaluation framework.

Social change is not easy, and existing social systems benefit, some at the expense of others, and are maintained by power relations. In planning for action, analysis of the power relations at stake, the beneficiaries of existing systems and their potential resistance to change is crucial. It is often wise to assess various options for actions, their potential benefits, risks and ways of mitigating those risks. Sometimes a group may collectively decide to settle for relatively secure, and less-risky, small wins but with the building of sufficient power, a group may take on a bigger challenge 54 .

Ethical considerations are fundamental to every aspect of PAR. They include standard research ethics considerations traditionally addressed by research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs), including key principles of avoidance of harm, anonymity and confidentiality, and voluntary informed consent, although these issues may become much more complex than traditionally presented, when working within a PAR framework 55 . PAR studies typically benefit from IRBs that can engage with the relational specificities of a case, with a flexible and iterative approach to research design with communities, instead of being beholden to very strict and narrow procedures. Wilson and colleagues 56 provide a comprehensive review of ethical challenges in PAR.

Beyond procedural research ethics perspectives, relational ethics are important to PAR projects and raise crucial questions regarding the purpose and conduct of knowledge production and application 37 , 57 , 58 . Relational ethics encourage an emphasis on inclusive practices, dialogue, mutual respect and care, collective decision-making and collaborative action 57 . Questions posed by Indigenous scholars seeking to decolonize Western knowledge production practices are pertinent to a relational ethics approach 4 , 28 . These include: Who designs and manages the research process? Whose purposes does the research serve? Whose worldviews are reproduced? Who decides what counts as knowledge? Why is this knowledge produced? Who benefits from this knowledge? Who determines which aspects of the research will be written up, disseminated and used, and how? Addressing such questions requires scholars to attend to the ethical practices of cultivating trusting and reciprocal relationships with participants and ensuring that the organizations, communities and persons involved co-govern and benefit from the project.

Reflecting on the ethics of her PAR project with young undocumented students in the USA, Cahill 55 highlights some of the intensely complex ethical issues of representation that arose and that will face many related projects. Determining what should be shared with which audiences is intensely political and ethical. Cahill’s team considered editing out stories of dropping out to avoid feeding negative stereotypes. They confronted the dilemma of framing a critique of a discriminatory educational system, while simultaneously advocating that this flawed system should include undocumented students. They faced another common dilemma of how to stay true to their structural analysis of the sources of harms, while engaging decision-makers invested in the current status quo. These complex ethical–political issues arise in different forms in many PAR projects. No answer can be prescribed, but scholar–activists can prepare themselves by reading past case studies and being open to challenging debates with co-researchers.

The knowledge built by PAR is explicitly knowledge-for-action, informed by the relational ethical considerations of who and what the knowledge is for. PAR builds both local knowledge and conceptual knowledge. As a first step, PAR can help us to reflect locally, collectively, on our circumstances, priorities, diverse identities, causes of problems and potential routes to tackle them.

Such local knowledge might be represented in the form of statistical findings from a community survey, analyses of participants’ verbal or visual data, or analyses of workshop discussions. Findings may include elements such as an articulation of the status quo of a community issue; a participatory analysis of root causes and/or actionable elements of the problem; a power analysis of stakeholders; asset mapping; assessment of local needs and priorities. Analysis goes beyond the surface problems, to identify underlying roots of problems to inform potential lines of action.

Simultaneously, PAR also advances more global conceptual knowledge. As liberation theorists have noted, developments in societal understandings of inequalities, marginalization and liberation are often led by those battling such processes daily. For example, the young Black and Indigenous participants working with Tuck and Habtom 25 in Toronto, Canada, engaged as co-theorists in their project about the significance of social movements to young people and their post-secondary school futures. Through their photography project, they expressed how place, and its history, particularly histories of settler colonialism, matters in cities — against a more standard view that treated the urban as somehow interchangeable, modern or neutral. The authors argue for altered conceptions of urban and urban education scholarly literatures, in response to this youth-led knowledge.

A key skill in the art of PAR is in creating achievable actions by choosing a project that is engaging and ambitious with achievable elements, even where structures are resistant to change. PAR projects can produce actions across a wide range of scales (from ‘small, local’ to ‘large, structural’) and across different temporal scales. Some PAR projects are part of decades-long programmes. Within those programmes, an individual PAR project, taking place over 12 or 24 months, might make one small step in the process towards long-term change.

For example, an educational project with young people living in communities vulnerable to flooding in Brazil developed a portfolio of actions, including a seminar, a native seeds fair, support to an individual family affected by a landslide, a campaign for a safe environment for a children’s pre-school, a tree nursery at school and influencing the city’s mayor to extend the environmental project to all schools in the area 30 .

Often the ideal scenario is that such actions lead to material changes in the power of a community. Over the course of a 5-year journey, the Katkari community (Box 1 ) worked with PAR researchers to build community power to resist eviction. The community team compiled households’ proof of residence; documented the history of land use and housing; engaged local government about their situations and plans; and participated more actively in village life to cultivate support 39 . The university-based researchers collected land deeds and taught sessions on land rights, local government and how to acquire formal papers. They opened conversations with the local government on legal, ethical and practical issues. Collectively, their legal knowledge and groundwork gave them confidence to remove fencing erected by landlords and to take legal action to regularize their land rights, ultimately leading to 70 applications being made for formal village sites. This comprised a tangible change in the power relation between landlords and the communities. Even here, however, the authors do not simply celebrate their achievements, but recognize that power struggles are ongoing, landlords would continue to aggressively pursue their interests, and, thus, their achievements were provisional and would require vigilance and continued action.

Most crucially, PAR projects aim to develop university-based and community-based researchers’ collective agency, by building their capacities for collaboration, analysis and action. More specifically, collaborators develop multiple transferable skills, which include skills in conducting research, operating technology, designing outputs, leadership, facilitation, budgeting, networking and public speaking 31 , 59 , 60 .

University-based researchers build their own key capacities through exercising and developing skills, including those for collaboration, facilitation, public engagement and impact. Strong PAR projects may build capacities within the university to sustain long-term relationships with community projects, such as modified and improved infrastructures that work well with PAR modalities, appreciation of the value of long-term sustained reciprocal relations and personal and organizational relationships with communities outside the university.

Applications

PAR disrupts the traditional theory–application binary, which usually assumes that abstract knowledge is developed through basic science, to then be interpreted and applied in professional or community contexts. PAR projects are always applied in the sense that they are situated in concrete human and social problems and aim to produce workable local actions. PAR is a very flexible approach. A version of a PAR project could be devised to tackle almost any real-world problem — where the researchers are committed to an emancipatory and participatory epistemology. If one can identify a group of people interested in collectively generating knowledge-for-action in their own context or about their own practices, and as long as the researchers are willing and able to share power, the methods set out in this Primer could be applied to devise a PAR project.

PAR is consonant with participatory movements across multiple disciplines and sectors, and thus finds many intellectual homes. Its application is supported by social movements for inclusion, equity, representation of multiple voices, empowerment and emancipation. For instance, PAR responds to the value “nothing about us without us”, which has become a central tenet of disability studies. In youth studies, PAR is used to enhance the power of young people’s voices. In development studies, PAR has a long foundation as part of the demand for greater participation, to support locally appropriate, equitable and locally owned changes. In health-care research, PAR is used by communities of health professionals to reflect and improve on their own practices. PAR is used by groups of health-care service users or survivors to give a greater collective power to the voices of those at the sharp end of health care, often delegitimized by medical power. In environmental sciences, PAR can support local communities to take action to protect their environments. In community psychology, PAR is valued for its ability to nurture supportive and inclusive processes. In summary, PAR can be applied in a huge variety of contexts in which local ownership of research is valued.

Limitations to PAR’s application often stem from the institutional context. In certain (often dominant) academic circles, local knowledge is not valued, and contextually situated, problem-focused, research may be considered niche, applied or not generalizable. Hence, research institutions may not be set up to be responsive to a community’s situation or needs or to support scholar–activists working at the research–action boundary. Further, those who benefit from, or are comfortable with, the status quo of a community may actively resist attempts at change from below and may undermine PAR projects. In other cases, where a community is very divided or dispersed, PAR may not be the right approach. There are plenty of examples of PAR projects floundering, failing to create an active group or to achieve change, or completely falling through. Even such failures, however, shed light on the conditions of communities and the power relations they inhabit and offer lessons on ways of working and not working with groups in those situations.

Reproducibility and data deposition

Certain aspects of the open science movement can be productively engaged from within a PAR framework, whereas others are incompatible. A key issue is that PAR researchers do not strive for reproducibility, and many would contest the applicability of this construct. Nonetheless, there may be resonances between the open science principle of making information publicly available for re-use and those PAR projects that aim to render visible and audible the experience of a historically under-represented or mis-represented community. PAR projects that seek to represent previously hidden realities of, for example, environmental degradation, discriminatory experiences at the hands of public services, the social history of a traditionally marginalized group, or their neglected achievements, may consider creating and making public robust databases of information, or social history archives, with explicit informed permission of the relevant communities. For such projects, making knowledge accessible is an essential part of the action. Publicly relevant information should not be sequestered behind paywalls. PAR practitioners should thus plan carefully for cataloguing, storing and archiving information, and maintaining archives.

On the other hand, however, a blanket assumption that all data should be made freely available is rarely appropriate in a PAR project and may come into conflict with ethical priorities. Protecting participants’ confidentiality can mean that data cannot be made public. Protecting a community from reputational harm, in the context of widespread dehumanization, criminalization or stigmatization of dispossessed groups, may require protection of their privacy, especially if their lives or coping strategies are already pathologized 25 . Empirical materials do not belong to university-based researchers as data and cannot be treated as an academic commodity to be opened to other researchers. Open science practices should not extend to the opening of marginalized communities to knowledge exploitation by university researchers.

The principle of reproducibility is not intuitively meaningful to PAR projects, given their situated nature, that is, the fact that PAR is inherently embedded in particular concrete contexts and relationships 61 . Beyond reproducibility, other forms of mutual learning and cross-case learning are vitally important. We see increasing research fatigue in communities used, extractively, for research that does not benefit them. PAR teams should assess what research has been done in a setting to avoid duplication and wasting people’s time and should clearly prioritize community benefit. At the same time, PAR projects also aspire to produce knowledge with wider implications, typically discussed under the term generalizability or transferability. They do so by articulating how the project speaks to social, political, theoretical and methodological debates taking place in wider knowledge communities, in a form of “communicative generalisation” 62 . Collaborating and sharing experiences across PAR sites through visits, exchanges and joint analysis can help to generalize experiences 30 , 61 .

Limitations and optimizations

PAR projects often challenge the social structures that reproduce established power relations. In this section, we outline common challenges to PAR projects, to prompt early reflection. When to apply a workaround, compromise, concede, refuse or regroup and change strategy are decisions that each PAR team should make collectively. We do not have answers to all the concerns raised but offer mitigations that have been found useful.

Institutional infrastructure

Universities’ interests in partnerships with communities, local relevance, being outward-facing, public engagement and achieving social impact can help to create a supportive environment for PAR research. Simultaneously, university bureaucracies and knowledge hierarchies that prize their scientists as individuals rather than collaborators and that prioritize the methods of dominant science can undermine PAR projects 63 . When Cowan, Kühlbrandt and Riazuddin 45 proposed using gaming, drama, fiction and film-making for a project engaging young people in thinking about scientific futures, a grants manager responded “But this project can’t just be about having fun activities for kids — where is the research in what you’re proposing?” Research infrastructures are often slow and reluctant to adapt to innovations in creative research approaches.

Research institutions’ funding time frames are also often out of sync with those of communities — being too extended in some ways and too short in others 45 , 64 . Securing funding takes months and years, especially if there are initial rejections or setbacks. Publishing findings takes further years. For community-based partners, a year is a long time to wait and to maintain people’s interest. On the other hand, grant funding for one-off projects over a year or two (or even five) is rarely sufficient to create anything sustainable, reasserting precarity and short-termism. Institutions can better support PAR through infrastructure such as bridging funds between grants, secure staff appointments and institutional recognition and resources for community partners.

University infrastructures can value the long-term partnership working of PAR scholars by recognizing partnership-building as a respected element of an academic career and recognizing collaborative research as much as individual academic celebrity. Where research infrastructures are unsupportive, building relationships within the university with like-minded professional and academic colleagues, to share work-arounds and advocate collectively, can be very helpful. Other colleagues might have developed mechanisms to pay co-researchers, or to pay in advance for refreshments, speed up disbursement of funds, or deal with an ethics committee, IRB, finance office or thesis examiner who misunderstands participatory research. PAR scholars can find support in university structures beyond the research infrastructure, such as those concerned with knowledge exchange and impact, campus–community partnerships, extension activities, public engagement or diversity and inclusion 64 . If PAR is institutionally marginalized, exploring and identifying these work-arounds is extremely labour intensive and depends on the cultivation of human, social and cultural capital over many years, which is not normally available to graduate students or precariously employed researchers. Thus, for PAR to be realized, institutional commitment is vital.

Co-option by powerful structures

When PAR takes place in collaboration or engagement with powerful institutions such as government departments, health services, religious organizations, charities or private companies, co-option is a significant risk. Such organizations experience social pressure to be inclusive, diverse, responsive to communities and participatory, so they may be tempted to engage communities in consultation, without redistributing power. For instance, when ‘photovoice’ projects invite politicians to exhibitions of photographs, their activity may be co-opted to serving the politician’s interest in being seen to express support, but result in no further action. There is a risk that using PAR in such a setting risks tokenizing marginalized voices 65 . In one of our current projects, co-researchers explore the framing of sexual violence interventions in Zambia, aiming to promote greater community agency and reduce the centrality of approaches dominated by the Global North 66 . One of the most challenging dilemmas is the need to involve current policymakers in discussions without alienating them. The advice to ‘be realistic’, ‘be reasonable’ or ‘play the game’ to keep existing power brokers at the table creates one of the most difficult tensions for PAR scholars 48 .

We also caution against scholars idealizing PAR as an ideal, egalitarian, inclusive or perfect process. The term ‘participation’ has become a policy buzzword, invoked in a vaguely positive way to strengthen an organization’s case that they have listened to people. It can equally be used by researchers to claim a moral high ground without disrupting power relations. Depriving words of their associated actions, Freire 7 warns us, leads to ‘empty blah’, because words gain their meaning in being harnessed to action. Labelling our work PAR does not make it emancipatory, without emancipatory action. Equally, Freire cautions against acting without the necessary critical reflection.

To avoid romanticization or co-option, PAR practitioners benefit from being held accountable to their shared principles and commitments by their critical networks and collaborators. Our commitments to community colleagues and to action should be as real for us as any institutional pressures on us. Creating an environment for that accountability is vital. Box 4 offers a project exemplar featuring key considerations regarding power concerns.

Box 4 Case study: participatory power and its vulnerability

Júba Wajiín is a pueblo in a rural mountainous region in the lands now called Guerrero, Mexico, long inhabited by the Me’phaa people, who have fiercely resisted precolonial, colonial and postcolonial displacement and dispossession. Using collective participatory action methods, this small pueblo launched and won a long legal battle that now challenges extractive mining practices.

Between 2001 and 2012, the Mexican government awarded massive mining concessions to mining companies. The people of Júba Wajiín discovered in mid-2013 that, unbeknown to them, concessions for mining exploration of their lands had been awarded to the British-based mining company Horschild Mexico. They engaged human rights activists who used participatory action research methods to create awareness and to launch a legal battle. Tlachinollan, a regional human rights organization, held legal counselling workshops and meetings with local authorities and community elders.

The courts initially rejected the case by denying that residents could be identified as Indigenous because they practised Catholicism and spoke Spanish. A media organization, La Sandia Digital , supported the community to collectively document their syncretic religious and spiritual practices, their ability to speak Mhe’paa language and their longstanding agrarian use of the territory. They produced a documentary film Juba Wajiin: Resistencia en la Montaña , providing visual legal evidence.

After winning in the District court, they took the case to the Supreme Court, asking it to review the legality and validity of the mining concessions. Horschild, along with other mining companies, stopped contesting the case, which led to the concessions being null and void.

The broader question of Indigenous peoples’ territorial rights continued in the courts until mid-2022 when the Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous peoples had the constitutional right to be consulted before any mining activities in their territory. This was a win, but a partial one. ‘Consultations’ are often manipulated by state and private sectors, particularly among groups experiencing dire impoverishment. Júba Wajiín’s strategies proved successful but the struggle against displacement and dispossession is continual.

Power inequalities within PAR

Power inequalities also affect PAR teams and communities. For all the emphasis on egalitarian relationships and dialogue, communities and PAR teams are typically composed of actors with unequal capacities and powers, introducing highly complex challenges for PAR teams.

Most frequently, university-based researchers engaging with marginalized communities do not themselves share many aspects of the identities or life experiences of those communities. They often occupy different, often more privileged, social networks, income brackets, racialized identities, skill sets and access to resources. Evidently, the premise of PAR is that people with different lives can productively collaborate, but gulfs in life experience and privilege can yield difficult tensions and challenges. Expressions of discomfort, dissatisfaction or anger in PAR projects are often indicative of power inequalities and an opportunity to interrogate and challenge hierarchies. Scholars must work hard to undo their assumptions about where expertise and insights may lie. A first step can be to develop an analysis of a scholar’s own participation in the perpetuation of inequalities. Projects can be designed to intentionally redistribute power, by redistributing skills, responsibilities and authority, or by redesigning core activities to be more widely accessible. For instance, Marzi 51 in a participatory video project, used role swapping to distribute the leadership roles of chairing meetings, choosing themes for focus and editing, among all the participants.

Within communities, there are also power asymmetries. The term ‘community participation’ itself risks homogenizing a community, such that one or a small number of representatives are taken to qualify as the community. Yet, communities are characterized by diversity as much as by commonality, with differences across sociological lines such as class, race, gender, age, occupation, housing tenure and health status. Having the time, resources and ability to participate is unlikely to be evenly distributed. Some people need to devote their limited time to survival and care of others. For some, the embodied realities of health conditions and disabilities make participation in research projects difficult or undesirable 67 . If there are benefits attached to participation, careful attention to the distribution of such benefits is needed, as well as critical awareness of the positionality of those involved and those excluded. Active efforts to maximize accessibility are important, including paying participants for their valued time; providing accommodations for people with health conditions, disabilities, caring responsibilities or other specific needs; and designing participatory activities that are intuitive to a community’s typical modes of communication.

Lack of control and unpredictability

For researchers accustomed to leading research by taking responsibility to drive a project to completion, using the most rigorous methods possible, to achieve stated objectives, the collaborative, iterative nature of PAR can raise personal challenges. Sense 68 likens the facilitative role of a PAR practitioner to “trying to drive the bus from the rear passenger seat—wanting to genuinely participate as a passenger but still wanting some degree of control over the destination”. PAR works best with collaborative approaches to leadership and identities among co-researchers as active team members, facilitators and participants in a research setting, prepared to be flexible and responsive to provocations from the situation and from co-researchers and to adjust project plans accordingly 28 , 68 , 69 . The complexities involved in balancing control issues foreground the importance of reflexive practice for all team members to learn together through dialogue 70 . Training and socialization into collaborative approaches to leadership and partnership are crucial supports. Well-functioning collaborative ways of working are also vital, as their trusted structure can allow co-researchers to ‘trust the process’, and accept uncertainties, differing perspectives, changes of emphasis and disruptions of assumptions. We often want surprises in PAR projects, as they show that we are learning something new, and so we need to be prepared to accept disruption.

The PAR outlook is caught up in the ongoing history of the push and pull of popular movements for the recognition of local knowledge and elite movements to centralize authority and power in frameworks such as universal science, professional ownership of expertise, government authority or evidence-based policy. As a named methodological paradigm, PAR gained legitimacy and recognition during the 1980s, with origins in popular education for development, led by scholars from the Global South 16 , 32 , and taken up in the more Global-North-dominated field of international development, where the failings of externally imposed, contextually insensitive development solutions had become undeniable 21 . Over the decades, PAR has both participated in radical social movements and risked co-option and depoliticization as it became championed by powerful institutions, and it is in this light that we consider PAR’s relation to three contemporary societal movements.

Decolonizing or re-powering

The development of PAR took place in tandem with anti-colonial movements and discourses during the 1970s and 1980s, in which the colonization of land, people and knowledge were all at stake. During the mid-2010s, calls for decolonization of the university were forced onto the agenda of the powerful by various groups, including African students and youth leading the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, ‘Fees must Fall’ and ‘Gandhi must Fall’ movements 71 , followed by the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 (ref. 72 ). PAR is a methodology that stands to contribute to decolonization-colonization through the development of alternatives to centralizing knowledge and power. As such, the vitality of local and global movements demanding recognition of grassroots knowledge and the dismantling of oppressive historical power–knowledge systems heralds many openings and exciting potential collaborations and causes for PAR practitioners 73 , 74 . As these demands make themselves felt in powerful institutions, they create openings for PAR.

Yet, just as PAR has been subject to co-option and depoliticization, the concept of decolonization too is at risk of appropriation by dominant groups and further tokenization of Indigenous groups, as universities, government departments and global health institutions absorb the concept, fitting it into their existing power structures 41 , 75 . In this context, Indigenous theorists in Aotearoa/New Zealand are working on an alternative concept of ‘re-powering Indigenous knowledge’ instead of ‘decolonizing knowledge’. By doing so, they centre Indigenous people and their knowledge, instead of the knowledge or actions of colonizers, and foreground the necessity of changes to power relations. African and African American scholars working on African heritage and political agency have drawn on the Akan philosophy of Sankofa for a similar purpose 76 . Sankofa derives from a Twi proverb Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri (It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind). Going back to fetch what is lost is a self-grounded act that draws on the riches of Indigenous history to re-imagine and restructure the future 77 . It is also an act independent of the colonial and colonizing gaze. Contributing to a mid-twenty-first century re-powering community knowledge is a promising vision for PAR. More broadly, the loud voices and visionary leadership of contemporary anti-racist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, intersectional feminist and other emancipatory movements provide a vibrant context to re-invent and renew PAR.

Co-production

In fields concerned with health and public service provision, a renewed discourse of respectful engagement with communities and service users has centred in recent years on the concept of co-production 78 . In past iterations, concepts such as citizen engagement, patient participation, community participation and community mobilization had a similar role. Participatory methods have proved their relevance within such contexts, for example, providing actionable and wise insights to clinicians seeking to learn from patients, or to providers of social services seeking to target their services better. Thus, the introduction of co-production may create a receptive environment for PAR in public services. Yet again, if users are participating in something, critical PAR scholars should question in which structures they are participating, instantiating which power relations and to whose benefit. PAR scholars can find themselves compromised by institutional requirements. Identifying potential compromises, lines that cannot be crossed and areas where compromises can be made; negotiating with institutional orders; and navigating discomfort and even conflict are key skills for practitioners of PAR within institutional settings.

One approach to engaging with institutional structures has been to gather evidence for the value of PAR, according to the measures and methods of dominant science. Anyon and colleagues 59 systematically reviewed the Youth PAR literature in the United States. They found emerging evidence that PAR produces positive outcomes for youth and argued for further research using experimental designs to provide harder evidence. They make the pragmatic argument that funding bodies require certain forms of evidence to justify funding, and so PAR would benefit by playing by those rules.

A different approach, grounded in politics rather than the academy, situates co-production as sustained by democratic struggles. In the context of sustainability research in the Amazon, for instance, Perz and colleagues 79 argue that the days of externally driven research are past. Mobilization by community associations, Indigenous federations, producer cooperatives and labour unions to demand influence over the governance of natural resources goes hand in hand with expectations of local leadership and ownership of research, often implemented through PAR. These approaches critically question the desirability of institutional, external funding or even non-monetary support for a particular PAR project.

Global–local inequality and solidarity

Insufferable global and local inequalities continue to grow, intensified by climate catastrophes, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and extreme concentrations of wealth and political influence, and contested by increasingly impactful analyses, protests and refusals by those disadvantaged and discriminated against. Considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on PAR projects, Auerbach and colleagues 64 identify increasing marketization and austerity in some universities, and the material context of growing pressure on marginalized communities to simply meet their needs for survival, leaving little capacity for participating in and building long-term partnerships. They describe university-based researchers relying on their own capacities to invent new modes of digital collaboration and nourish their partnerships with communities, often despite limited institutional support.

We suggest that building solidaristic networks, and thus building collective power, within and beyond universities offers the most promising grounding for a fruitful outlook for PAR. PAR scholars can find solidarity across a range of disciplines, traditions, social movements, topics and geographical locations. Doing so offers to bridge traditions, share strategies and resonances, build methodologies and politics, and crucially, build power. In global health research, Abimbola and colleagues 80 call for the building of Southern networks to break away from the dominance of North–South partnerships. They conceptualize the South not only as a geographical location, as there are of course knowledge elites in the South, but as the communities traditionally marginalized from centres of authority and power. We suggest that PAR can best maximize its societal contribution and its own development and renewal by harnessing the diverse wisdom of knowledge generation and participatory methods across Southern regions and communities, using that wisdom to participate in global solidarities and demands for redistribution of knowledge, wealth and power.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank their PAR collaborators and teachers, who have shown us how to take care of each other, our communities and environments. They thank each other for generating such a productive critical thinking space and extending care during challenging times.

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Flora Cornish & Nancy Breton

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Ulises Moreno-Tabarez

Department of Communication Studies, California State University, Northridge, CA, USA

Jenna Delgado

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Ama de-Graft Aikins

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Involving multiple team members in the analysis and interpretation of materials generated, typically in iterative cycles of individual or pair work and group discussion.

Both a structure and a process, community refers to a network of often diverse and unequal persons engaged in common tasks or actions, stakes or interests that lead them to form social ties or commune with one another.

A process through which a person or group’s activities are altered or appropriated to serve another group’s interests.

A term typically used in service provision to describe partnership working between service providers and service users, to jointly produce decisions or designs.

A call to recognize and dismantle the destructive legacies of colonialism in societal institutions, to re-power indigenous groups and to construct alternative relationships between peoples and knowledges that liberate knowers and doers from colonial extraction and centralization of power.

Scholarship that creates knowledge of the conditions that limit or oppress us to liberate ourselves from those conditions and to support others in their own transformations.

Injustices in relation to knowledge, including whose knowledge counts and which knowledge is deemed valid or not.

Research that extracts information and exploits relationships, places and peoples, producing benefit for scholars or institutions elsewhere, and depleting resources at the sites of the research.

Knowledge that is rooted in experience in a particular social context, often devalued by social science perspectives that make claims to generalizability or universality.

The relationships of domination, subordination and resistance between individuals or social groups, allowing some to advance their perspectives and interests more than others.

A methodological practice through which scholars critically reflect on their own positionality and how it impacts on participants and co-researchers, understanding of the topic and the knowledge produced.

An approach to ethical conduct that situates ethics as ongoingly negotiated within the context of respectful relationships, beyond following the procedural rules often set out by ethics committees.

A dual role in which scholars use their knowledge (scholarship) to tackle injustices and instigate changes (activism) in collaboration with marginalized communities and/or organizations.

Doing something or appointing a person for reasons other than in the interest of enabling meaningful change.

A systemic change in which relationships and structures are fundamentally altered, often contrasted with smaller-scale changes such as varying or refining existing relations.

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Action Research: Steps, Benefits, and Tips

Introduction

History of action research, what is the definition of action research, types of action research, conducting action research.

Action research stands as a unique approach in the realm of qualitative inquiry in social science research. Rooted in real-world problems, it seeks not just to understand but also to act, bringing about positive change in specific contexts. Often distinguished by its collaborative nature, the action research process goes beyond traditional research paradigms by emphasizing the involvement of those being studied in resolving social conflicts and effecting positive change.

The value of action research lies not just in its outcomes, but also in the process itself, where stakeholders become active participants rather than mere subjects. In this article, we'll examine action research in depth, shedding light on its history, principles, and types of action research.

Tracing its roots back to the mid-20th century, Kurt Lewin developed classical action research as a response to traditional research methods in the social sciences that often sidelined the very communities they studied. Proponents of action research championed the idea that research should not just be an observational exercise but an actionable one that involves devising practical solutions. Advocates believed in the idea of research leading to immediate social action, emphasizing the importance of involving the community in the process.

Applications for action research

Over the years, action research has evolved and diversified. From its early applications in social psychology and organizational development, it has branched out into various fields such as education, healthcare, and community development, informing questions around improving schools, minority problems, and more. This growth wasn't just in application, but also in its methodologies.

How is action research different?

Like all research methodologies, effective action research generates knowledge. However, action research stands apart in its commitment to instigate tangible change. Traditional research often places emphasis on passive observation , employing data collection methods primarily to contribute to broader theoretical frameworks . In contrast, action research is inherently proactive, intertwining the acts of observing and acting.

The primary goal isn't just to understand a problem but to solve or alleviate it. Action researchers partner closely with communities, ensuring that the research process directly benefits those involved. This collaboration often leads to immediate interventions, tweaks, or solutions applied in real-time, marking a departure from other forms of research that might wait until the end of a study to make recommendations.

This proactive, change-driven nature makes action research particularly impactful in settings where immediate change is not just beneficial but essential.

Action research is best understood as a systematic approach to cooperative inquiry. Unlike traditional research methodologies that might primarily focus on generating knowledge, action research emphasizes producing actionable solutions for pressing real-world challenges.

This form of research undertakes a cyclic and reflective journey, typically cycling through stages of planning , acting, observing, and reflecting. A defining characteristic of action research is the collaborative spirit it embodies, often dissolving the rigid distinction between the researcher and the researched, leading to mutual learning and shared outcomes.

Advantages of action research

One of the foremost benefits of action research is the immediacy of its application. Since the research is embedded within real-world issues, any findings or solutions derived can often be integrated straightaway, catalyzing prompt improvements within the concerned community or organization. This immediacy is coupled with the empowering nature of the methodology. Participants aren't mere subjects; they actively shape the research process, giving them a tangible sense of ownership over both the research journey and its eventual outcomes.

Moreover, the inherent adaptability of action research allows researchers to tweak their approaches responsively based on live feedback. This ensures the research remains rooted in the evolving context, capturing the nuances of the situation and making any necessary adjustments. Lastly, this form of research tends to offer a comprehensive understanding of the issue at hand, harmonizing socially constructed theoretical knowledge with hands-on insights, leading to a richer, more textured understanding.

Disadvantages of action research

Like any methodology, action research isn't devoid of challenges. Its iterative nature, while beneficial, can extend timelines. Researchers might find themselves engaged in multiple cycles of observation, reflection, and action before arriving at a satisfactory conclusion. The intimate involvement of the researcher with the research participants, although crucial for collaboration, opens doors to potential conflicts. Through collaborative problem solving, disagreements can lead to richer and more nuanced solutions, but it can take considerable time and effort.

Another limitation stems from its focus on a specific context: results derived from a particular action research project might not always resonate or be applicable in a different context or with a different group. Lastly, the depth of collaboration this methodology demands means all stakeholders need to be deeply invested, and such a level of commitment might not always be feasible.

Examples of action research

To illustrate, let's consider a few scenarios. Imagine a classroom where a teacher observes dwindling student participation. Instead of sticking to conventional methods, the teacher experiments with introducing group-based activities. As the outcomes unfold, the teacher continually refines the approach based on student feedback, eventually leading to a teaching strategy that rejuvenates student engagement.

In a healthcare context, hospital staff who recognize growing patient anxiety related to certain procedures might innovate by introducing a new patient-informing protocol. As they study the effects of this change, they could, through iterations, sculpt a procedure that diminishes patient anxiety.

Similarly, in the realm of community development, a community grappling with the absence of child-friendly public spaces might collaborate with local authorities to conceptualize a park. As they monitor its utilization and societal impact, continual feedback could refine the park's infrastructure and design.

Contemporary action research, while grounded in the core principles of collaboration, reflection, and change, has seen various adaptations tailored to the specific needs of different contexts and fields. These adaptations have led to the emergence of distinct types of action research, each with its unique emphasis and approach.

Collaborative action research

Collaborative action research emphasizes the joint efforts of professionals, often from the same field, working together to address common concerns or challenges. In this approach, there's a strong emphasis on shared responsibility, mutual respect, and co-learning. For example, a group of classroom teachers might collaboratively investigate methods to improve student literacy, pooling their expertise and resources to devise, implement, and refine strategies for improving teaching.

Participatory action research

Participatory action research (PAR) goes a step further in dissolving the barriers between the researcher and the researched. It actively involves community members or stakeholders not just as participants, but as equal partners in the entire research process. PAR is deeply democratic and seeks to empower participants, fostering a sense of agency and ownership. For instance, a participatory research project might involve local residents in studying and addressing community health concerns, ensuring that the research process and outcomes are both informed by and beneficial to the community itself.

Educational action research

Educational action research is tailored specifically to practical educational contexts. Here, educators take on the dual role of teacher and researcher, seeking to improve teaching practices, curricula, classroom dynamics, or educational evaluation. This type of research is cyclical, with educators implementing changes, observing outcomes, and reflecting on results to continually enhance the educational experience. An example might be a teacher studying the impact of technology integration in her classroom, adjusting strategies based on student feedback and learning outcomes.

Community-based action research

Another noteworthy type is community-based action research, which focuses primarily on community development and well-being. Rooted in the principles of social justice, this approach emphasizes the collective power of community members to identify, study, and address their challenges. It's particularly powerful in grassroots movements and local development projects where community insights and collaboration drive meaningful, sustainable change.

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Engaging in action research is both an enlightening and transformative journey, rooted in practicality yet deeply connected to theory. For those embarking on this path, understanding the essentials of an action research study and the significance of a research cycle is paramount.

Understanding the action research cycle

At the heart of action research is its cycle, a structured yet adaptable framework guiding the research. This cycle embodies the iterative nature of action research, emphasizing that learning and change evolve through repetition and reflection.

The typical stages include:

Identifying a problem : This is the starting point where the action researcher pinpoints a pressing issue or challenge that demands attention.
Planning : Here, the researcher devises an action research strategy aimed at addressing the identified problem. In action research, network resources, participant consultation, and the literature review are core components in planning.
Action : The planned strategies are then implemented in this stage. This 'action' phase is where theoretical knowledge meets practical application.
Observation : Post-implementation, the researcher observes the outcomes and effects of the action. This stage ensures that the research remains grounded in the real-world context.
Critical reflection : This part of the cycle involves analyzing the observed results to draw conclusions about their effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
Revision : Based on the insights from reflection, the initial plan is revised, marking the beginning of another cycle.

Rigorous research and iteration

It's essential to understand that while action research is deeply practical, it doesn't sacrifice rigor . The cyclical process ensures that the research remains thorough and robust. Each iteration of the cycle in an action research project refines the approach, drawing it closer to an effective solution.

The role of the action researcher

The action researcher stands at the nexus of theory and practice. Not just an observer, the researcher actively engages with the study's participants, collaboratively navigating through the research cycle by conducting interviews, participant observations, and member checking . This close involvement ensures that the study remains relevant, timely, and responsive.

Drawing conclusions and informing theory

As the research progresses through multiple iterations of data collection and data analysis , drawing conclusions becomes an integral aspect. These conclusions, while immediately beneficial in addressing the practical issue at hand, also serve a broader purpose. They inform theory, enriching the academic discourse and providing valuable insights for future research.

Identifying actionable insights

Keep in mind that action research should facilitate implications for professional practice as well as space for systematic inquiry. As you draw conclusions about the knowledge generated from action research, consider how this knowledge can create new forms of solutions to the pressing concern you set out to address.

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Frequently asked questions

Action Research

What is action research.

Action research is a methodology that emphasizes collaboration between researchers and participants to identify problems, develop solutions and implement changes. Designers plan, act, observe and reflect, and aim to drive positive change in a specific context. Action research prioritizes practical solutions and improvement of practice, unlike knowledge generation, which is the priority of traditional methods.

Why is Action Research Important in UX Design?

Action research stands out as a unique approach in user experience design (UX design), among other types of research methodologies and fields. It has a hands-on, practical focus, so UX designers and researchers who engage in it devise and execute research that not only gathers data but also leads to actionable insights and solid real-world solutions.

The concept of action research dates back to the 1940s, with its roots in the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin emphasized the importance of action in understanding and improving human systems. The approach rapidly gained popularity across various fields, including education, healthcare, social work and community development.

Kurt Lewin, the Founder of social psychology.

In UX design, the incorporation of action research appeared with the rise of human-centered design principles. As UX design started to focus more on users' needs and experiences, the participatory and problem-solving nature of action research became increasingly significant. Action research bridges the gap between theory and practice in UX design. It enables designers to move beyond hypothetical assumptions and base their design decisions on concrete, real-world data. This not only enhances the effectiveness of the design but also boosts its credibility and acceptance among users—vital bonuses for product designers and service designers.

At its core, action research is a systematic, participatory and collaborative approach to research . It emphasizes direct engagement with specific issues or problems and aims to bring about positive change within a particular context. Traditional research methodologies tend to focus solely on the generation of theoretical knowledge. Meanwhile, action research aims to solve real-world problems and generate knowledge simultaneously .

Action research helps designers and design teams gather first-hand insights so they can deeply understand their users' needs, preferences and behaviors. With it, they can devise solutions that genuinely address their users’ problems—and so design products or services that will resonate with their target audiences. As designers actively involve users in the research process, they can gather authentic insights and co-create solutions that are both effective and user-centric.

Moreover, the iterative nature of action research aligns perfectly with the UX design process. It allows designers to continuously learn from users' feedback, adapt their designs accordingly, and test their effectiveness in real-world contexts. This iterative loop of planning, acting, observing and reflecting ensures that the final design solution is user-centric. However, it also ensures that actual user behavior and feedback validates the solution that a design team produces, which helps to make action research studies particularly rewarding for some brands.

Designers can continuously learn from users’ feedback in action research and iterate accordingly.

What is The Action Research Process?

Action research in UX design involves several stages. Each stage contributes to the ultimate goal: to create effective and user-centric design solutions. Here is a step-by-step breakdown of the process:

1. Identify the Problem

This could be a particular pain point users are facing, a gap in the current UX design, or an opportunity for improvement.

2. Plan the Action

Designers might need to devise new design features, modify existing ones or implement new user interaction strategies.

3. Implement the Action

Designers put their planned actions into practice. They might prototype the new design, implement the new features or test the new user interaction strategies.

4. Observe and Collect Data

As designers implement the action they’ve decided upon, it's crucial to observe its effects and collect data. This could mean that designers track user behaviors, collect user feedback, conduct usability tests or use other data collection methods.

5. Reflect on the Results

From the collected data, designers reflect on the results, analyze the effectiveness of the action and draw insights. If the action has led to positive outcomes, they can further refine it and integrate it into the final design. If not, they can go back to plan new actions and repeat the process.

An action research example could be where designers do the following:

Identification : Designers observe a high abandonment rate during a checkout process for an e-commerce website.

Planning : They analyze the checkout flow to identify potential friction points.

Action : They isolate these points, streamline the checkout process, introduce guest checkout and optimize form fields.

Observation : They monitor changes in abandonment rates and collect user feedback.

Reflection : They assess the effectiveness of the changes as these reduce checkout abandonment.

Outcome : The design team notices a significant decrease in checkout abandonment, which leads to higher conversion rates as more users successfully purchase goods.

What Types of Action Research are there?

Action research splits into three main types: technical, collaborative and critical reflection.

1. Technical Action Research

Technical action research focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a system or process. Designers often use it in organizational contexts to address specific issues or enhance operations. This could be where designers improve the usability of a website, optimize the load time of an application or enhance the accessibility of a digital product.

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2. Collaborative Action Research

Collaborative action research emphasizes the active participation of stakeholders in the research process. It's about working together to identify issues, co-create solutions and implement changes. In the context of UX design, this could mean that designers collaborate with users to co-design a new feature, work with developers to optimize a process, or partner with business stakeholders to align the UX strategy with business goals.

3. Critical Reflection Action Research

Critical reflection action research aims to challenge dominant power structures and social injustices within a particular context. It emphasizes the importance of where designers and design teams reflect on the underlying assumptions and values that drive research and decision-making processes. In UX design, this could be where designers question the design biases, challenge the stereotypes, and promote inclusivity and diversity in design decisions.

What are the Benefits and Challenges of Action Research?

Like any UX research method or approach, action research comes with its own set of benefits and challenges.

Benefits of Action Research

Real-world solutions.

Action research focuses on solving real-world problems. This quality makes it highly relevant and practical. It allows UX designers to create solutions that are not just theoretically sound but also valid in real-world contexts.

User Involvement

Action research involves users in the research process, which lets designers gather first-hand insights into users' needs, preferences and behaviors. This not only enhances the accuracy and reliability of the research but also fosters user engagement and ownership long before user testing of high-fidelity prototypes.

Continuous Learning

The iterative nature of action research promotes continuous learning and improvement. It enables designers to adapt their designs based on users' feedback and learn from their successes and failures. They can fine-tune better tools and deliverables, such as more accurate user personas, from their findings.

Author and Human-Computer Interaction Expert, Professor Alan Dix explains personas and why they are important:

Challenges of Action Research

Time- and resource-intensive.

Action research involves multiple iterations of planning, acting, observing and reflecting, which can be time- and resource-intensive.

Complexity of Real-world Contexts

It can be difficult to implement changes and observe their effects in real-world contexts. This is due to the complexity and unpredictability of real-world situations.

Risk of Subjectivity

Since action research involves close collaboration with stakeholders, there's a risk of subjectivity and bias influencing the research outcomes. It's crucial for designers to maintain objectivity and integrity throughout the research process.

Ethical Considerations

It can be a challenge to ensure all participants understand the nature of the research and agree to participate willingly. Also, it’s vital to safeguard the privacy of participants and sensitive data.

Scope Creep

The iterative nature of action research might lead to expanding goals, and make the project unwieldy.

Generalizability

The contextual focus of action research may limit the extent to which designers can generalize findings from field studies to other settings.

Best Practices and Tips for Successful Action Research

1. define clear objectives.

To begin, designers should define clear objectives. They should ask the following:

What is the problem to try to solve?

What change is desirable as an outcome?

To have clear objectives will guide their research process and help them stay focused.

2. Involve Users

It’s vital to involve users in the research process. Designers should collaborate with them to identify issues, co-create solutions and implement changes in real time. This will not only enhance the relevance of the research but also foster user engagement and ownership.

3. Use a Variety of Data Collection Methods

To conduct action research means to observe the effects of changes in real-world contexts. This requires a variety of data collection methods. Designers should use methods like surveys, user interviews, observations and usability tests to gather diverse and comprehensive data.

UX Strategist and Consultant, William Hudson explains the value of usability testing in this video:

4. Reflect and Learn

Action research is all about learning from action. Designers should reflect on the outcomes of their actions, analyze the effectiveness of their solutions and draw insights. They can use these insights to inform their future actions and continuously improve the design.

5. Communicate and Share Findings

Lastly, designers should communicate and share their findings with all stakeholders. This not only fosters transparency and trust but also facilitates collective learning and improvement.

What are Other Considerations to Bear in Mind with Action Research?

Quantitative data.

Action research involves both qualitative and quantitative data, but it's important to remember to place emphasis on qualitative data. While quantitative data can provide useful insights, designers who rely too heavily on it may find a less holistic view of the user experience.

Professor Alan Dix explains the difference between quantitative and qualitative data in this video:

User Needs and Preferences

Designers should focus action research on understanding user needs and preferences. If they ignore these in favor of more technical considerations, the resulting design solutions may not meet users' expectations or provide them with a satisfactory experience.

User Feedback

It's important to seek user feedback at each stage of the action research process. Without this feedback, designers may not optimize design solutions for user needs. For example, they may find the information architecture confusing. Additionally, without user feedback, it can be difficult to identify any unexpected problems that may arise during the research process.

Time Allocation

Action research requires time and effort to ensure successful outcomes. If designers or design teams don’t permit enough time for the research process, it can lead to rushed decisions and sloppy results. It's crucial to plan ahead and set aside enough time for each stage of the action research process—and ensure that stakeholders understand the time-consuming nature of research and digesting research findings, and don’t push for premature results.

Contextual Factors

Contextual factors such as culture, environment and demographics play an important role in UX design. If designers ignore these factors, it can lead to ineffective design solutions that don't properly address users' needs and preferences or consider their context.

Professor Alan Dix explains the need to consider users’ culture in design, in this video:

Copyright holder: Tommi Vainikainen _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Copyright holder: Maik Meid _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons _ Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norge_93.jpg

Copyright holder: Paju _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons _ Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kaivokselan_kaivokset_kyltti.jpg

Copyright holder: Tiia Monto _ Appearance time: 2:56 - 3:03 Copyright license and terms: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons _ Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turku_-_harbour_sign.jpg

Overall, in the ever-evolving field of UX design, this is one methodology that can serve as a powerful research tool for driving positive change and promoting continuous learning. Since to do action research means to actively involve users in the research process and research projects, and focus on real-world problem-solving, it allows designers to create more user-centered designs. These digital solutions and services will be more likely to resonate with the target users and deliver exceptional user experiences.

Despite its challenges, the benefits of action research far outweigh the risks. Action research is therefore a valuable approach for UX designers who are keen on creating a wide range of impactful and sustainable design solutions. The biggest lesson with action research is to ensure that user needs and preferences are at the center of the research process.

Learn More about Action Research

Take our User Research: Methods and Best Practices course.

Take our Master Class Radical Participatory Design: Insights From NASA’s Service Design Lead with Victor Udoewa, Service Design Lead, NASA SBIR/STTR Program.

Read more in-depth information in 3 things design thinking can learn from action research by Amin Mojtahedi, PhD .

Find additional insights in What Technical Communicators and UX Designers Can Learn From Participatory Action Research by Guiseppe .

Discover more insights and tips in Action Research: Steps, Benefits, and Tips by Lauren Stewart .

Questions related to Action Research

Action research and design thinking are both methodologies to solve problems and implement changes, but they have different approaches and emphases. Here's how they differ:

Objectives

Action research aims to solve specific problems within a community or organization through a cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection. It focuses on iterative learning and solving real-world problems through direct intervention.

Design thinking focuses on addressing complex problems by understanding the user's needs, re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. It emphasizes innovation and the creation of solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable.

Process

Action research involves a cyclic process that includes:

- Identify a problem.

- Plan an action.

- Implement the action.

- Observe and evaluate the outcomes.

- Reflect on the findings and plan the next cycle.

Design thinking follows a non-linear, iterative process that typically includes five phases:

- Empathize: Understand the needs of those you're designing for.

- Define: Clearly articulate the problem you want to solve.

- Ideate: Brainstorm a range of creative solutions.

- Prototype: Build a representation of one or more of your ideas.

- Test: Return to your original user group and test your idea for feedback.

User Involvement

Action research actively involves participants in the research process. The participants are co-researchers and have a direct stake in the problem at hand.

Design thinking prioritizes empathy with users and stakeholders to ensure that the solutions are truly user-centered. While users are involved, especially in the empathy and testing phases, they may not be as deeply engaged in the entire process as they are in action research.

Outcome

Action research typically aims for practical outcomes that directly improve practices or address issues within the specific context studied. Its success is measurable by the extent of problem resolution or improvement.

Design thinking seeks to generate innovative solutions that may not only solve the identified problem but also provide a basis for new products, services or ways of thinking. The success is often measurable in terms of innovation, user satisfaction and feasibility of implementation.

In summary, while both action research and design thinking are valuable in addressing problems, action research is more about participatory problem-solving within specific contexts, and design thinking is about innovative solution-finding with a strong emphasis on user needs.

Take our Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide course.

To define the research question in an action research project, start by identifying a specific problem or area of interest in your practice or work setting. Reflect on this issue deeply to understand its nuances and implications. Then, narrow your focus to a question that is both actionable and researchable. This question should aim to explore ways to improve, change or understand the problem better. Ensure the question is clear, concise and aligned with the goals of your project. It must invite inquiry and suggest a path towards finding practical solutions or gaining deeper insights.

For instance, if you notice a decline in user engagement with a product, your research question could be, "How can we modify the user interface of our product to enhance user engagement?" This question clearly targets an improvement, focuses on a specific aspect (the user interface) and implies actionable outcomes (modifications to enhance engagement).

Take our Master Class Radical Participatory Design: Insights From NASA’s Service Design Lead with Victor Udoewa, Service Design Lead, NASA SBIR/STTR Program.

Designers use several tools and methods in action research to explore problems and implement solutions. Surveys allow them to gather feedback from a broad audience quickly. Interviews offer deep insights through personal conversations, focusing on users' experiences and needs. Observations help designers understand how people interact with products or services in real environments. Prototyping enables the testing of ideas and concepts through tangible models, and allows for immediate feedback and iteration. Finally, case studies provide detailed analysis of specific instances and offer valuable lessons and insights.

These tools and methods empower designers to collect data, analyze findings and make informed decisions. When designers employ a combination of these approaches, they ensure a comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand and develop effective solutions.

CEO of Experience Dynamics, Frank Spillers explains the need to be clear about the problem that designers should address:

To engage stakeholders in an action research project, first identify all individuals or groups with an interest in the project's outcome. These might include users, team members, clients or community representatives. Clearly communicate the goals, benefits and expected outcomes of the project to them. Use presentations, reports, or informal meetings to share your vision and how their involvement adds value.

Involve stakeholders early and often by soliciting their feedback through surveys, interviews or workshops. This inclusion not only provides valuable insights but also fosters a sense of ownership and commitment to the project. Establish regular update meetings or newsletters to keep stakeholders informed about progress, challenges and successes. Finally, ensure there are clear channels for stakeholders to share their input and concerns throughout the project.

This approach creates a collaborative environment where stakeholders feel valued and engaged, leading to more meaningful and impactful outcomes.

To measure the impact of an action research project, start by defining clear, measurable objectives at the beginning. These objectives should align with the goals of your project and provide a baseline against which you can measure progress. Use quantitative metrics such as increased user engagement, sales growth or improved performance scores for a tangible assessment of impact. Incorporate qualitative data as well, such as user feedback and case studies, to understand the subjective experiences and insights gained through the project.

Conduct surveys or interviews before and after the project to compare results and identify changes. Analyze this data to assess how well the project met its objectives and what effect it had on the target issue or audience. Document lessons learned and unexpected outcomes to provide a comprehensive view of the project's impact. This approach ensures a holistic evaluation, combining numerical data and personal insights to gauge the success and influence of your action research project effectively.

Take our Master Class Design KPIs: From Insights to Impact with Vitaly Friedman, Senior UX consultant, European Parliament, and Creative Lead, Smashing Magazine.

When unexpected results or obstacles emerge during action research, first, take a step back and assess the situation. Identify the nature of the unexpected outcome or obstacle and analyze its potential impact on your project. This step is crucial for understanding the issue at hand.

Next, communicate with your team and stakeholders about the situation. Open communication ensures everyone understands the issue and can contribute to finding a solution.

Then, consider adjusting your research plan or design strategy to accommodate the new findings or to overcome the obstacles. This might involve revisiting your research questions, methods or even the design problem you are addressing.

Always document these changes and the reasons behind them. This documentation will be valuable for understanding the project's evolution and for future reference.

Finally, view these challenges as learning opportunities. Unexpected results can lead to new insights and innovations that strengthen your project in the long run.

By remaining flexible, communicating effectively, and being willing to adjust your approach, you can navigate the uncertainties of action research and continue making progress towards your goals.

Professor Alan Dix explains externalization, a creative process that can help designers to adapt to unexpected roadblocks and find a good way forward:

Action research can significantly contribute to inclusive and accessible design by directly involving users with diverse needs in the research and design process. When designers engage individuals from various backgrounds, abilities and experiences, they can gain a deeper understanding of the wide range of user requirements and preferences. This approach ensures that the products or services they develop cater to a broader audience, including those with disabilities.

Furthermore, action research allows for iterative testing and feedback loops with users. This quality enables designers to identify and address accessibility challenges early in the design process. The continuous engagement helps in refining designs to be more user-friendly and inclusive.

Additionally, action research fosters a culture of empathy and understanding within design teams, as it emphasizes the importance of seeing the world from the users' perspectives. This empathetic approach leads to more thoughtful and inclusive design decisions, ultimately resulting in products and services that are accessible to everyone.

By prioritizing inclusivity and accessibility through action research, designers can create more equitable and accessible solutions that enhance the user experience for all.

Take our Master Class How to Design for Neurodiversity: Inclusive Content and UX with Katrin Suetterlin, UX Content Strategist, Architect and Consultant.

To ensure the reliability and validity of data in action research, follow these steps:

Define clear research questions: Start with specific, clear research questions to guide your data collection. This clarity helps in gathering relevant and focused data.

Use multiple data sources: Collect data from various sources to cross-verify information. This triangulation strengthens the reliability of your findings.

Apply consistent methods: Use consistent data collection methods throughout your research. If conducting surveys or interviews, keep questions consistent across participants to ensure comparability.

Engage in peer review: Have peers or experts review your research design and data analysis. Feedback can help identify biases or errors, and enhance the validity of your findings.

Document the process: Keep detailed records of your research process, including how you collected and analyzed data. Documentation allows others to understand and validate your research methodology.

Test and refine instruments: If you’re using surveys or assessment tools, test them for reliability and validity before using them extensively. Pilot testing helps refine these instruments, and ensures they accurately measure what they intend to.

When you adhere to these principles, you can enhance the reliability and validity of your action research data, leading to more trustworthy and impactful outcomes.

Take our Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX course.

To analyze data collected during an action research project, follow these steps:

Organize the data: Begin by organizing your data, categorizing information based on types, sources or research questions. This organization makes the data manageable and prepares you for in-depth analysis.

Identify patterns and themes: Look for patterns, trends and themes within your data. This might mean to code qualitative data or use statistical tools for quantitative data to uncover recurring elements or significant findings.

Compare findings to objectives: Match your findings against the research objectives. Assess how the data answers your research questions or addresses the issues you set out to explore.

Use software tools: Consider using data analysis software, especially for complex or large data sets. Tools like NVivo for qualitative data or SPSS for quantitative data can simplify analysis and help in identifying insights.

Draw conclusions: Based on your analysis, draw conclusions about what the data reveals. Look for insights that answer your research questions or offer solutions to the problem you are investigating.

Reflect and act: Reflect on the implications of your findings. Consider how they impact your understanding of the research problem and what actions they suggest for improvement or further investigation.

This approach to data analysis ensures a thorough understanding of the collected data, allowing you to draw meaningful conclusions and make informed decisions based on your action research project.

Professor Ann Blandford, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, UCL explains valuable aspects of data collection in this video:

Baskerville, R. L., & Wood-Harper, A. T. (1996). A critical perspective on action research as a method for information systems research . Journal of Information Technology, 11(3), 235-246.

This influential paper examines the philosophical underpinnings of action research and its application in information systems research, which is closely related to UX design. It highlights the strengths of action research in addressing complex, real-world problems, as well as the challenges in maintaining rigor and achieving generalizability. The paper helped establish action research as a valuable methodology in the information systems and UX design fields.

Di Mascio, T., & Tarantino, L. (2015). New Design Techniques for New Users: An Action Research-Based Approach . In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (pp. 83-96). ACM.

This paper describes an action research project that aimed to develop a novel data gathering technique for understanding the context of use of a technology-enhanced learning system for children. The authors argue that traditional laboratory experiments struggle to maintain relevance to the real world, and that action research, with its focus on solving practical problems, is better suited to addressing the needs of new ICT products and their users. The paper provides insights into the action research process and reflects on its value in defining new methods for solving complex, real-world problems. The work is influential in demonstrating the applicability of action research in the field of user experience design, particularly for designing for new and underserved user groups.

Villari, B. (2014). Action research approach in design research . In Proceedings of the 5th STS Italia Conference A Matter of Design: Making Society through Science and Technology (pp. 306-316). STS Italia Publishing.

This paper explores the application of action research in the field of design research. The author argues that design is a complex practice that requires interdisciplinary skills and the ability to engage with diverse communities. Action research is presented as a research strategy that can effectively merge theory and practice, linking the reflective dimension to practical activities. The key features of action research highlighted in the paper are its context-dependent nature, the close relationship between researchers and the communities involved, and the iterative process of examining one's own practice and using research insights to inform future actions. The paper is influential in demonstrating the value of action research in addressing the challenges of design research, particularly in terms of bridging the gap between theory and practice and fostering collaborative, user-centered approaches to design.

Brandt, E. (2004). Action research in user-centred product development . AI & Society, 18(2), 113-133.

This paper reports on the use of action research to introduce new user-centered work practices in two commercial product development projects. The author argues that the growing complexity of products and the increasing importance of quality, usability, and customization demand new collaborative approaches that involve customers and users directly in the development process. The paper highlights the value of using action research to support these new ways of working, particularly in terms of creating and reifying design insights in representations that can foster collaboration and continuity throughout the project. The work is influential in demonstrating the applicability of action research in the context of user-centered product development, where the need to bridge theory and practice and engage diverse stakeholders is paramount. The paper provides valuable insights into the practical challenges and benefits of adopting action research in this domain.

1. Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice . SAGE Publications.

This comprehensive handbook is considered a seminal work in the field of action research. It provides a thorough overview of the history, philosophical foundations, and diverse approaches to action research. The book features contributions from leading scholars and practitioners, covering topics such as participatory inquiry, critical action research, and the role of action research in organizational change and community development. It has been highly influential in establishing action research as a rigorous and impactful research methodology across various disciplines.

2. Stringer, E. T. (2013). Action Research (4th ed.) . SAGE Publications.

This book by Ernest T. Stringer is a widely recognized and accessible guide to conducting action research. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions on the action research process, including gathering information, interpreting and explaining findings, and taking action to address practical problems. The book is particularly valuable for novice researchers and practitioners in fields such as education, social work, and community development, where action research is commonly applied. Its practical approach and real-life examples have made it a go-to resource for those seeking to engage in collaborative, solution-oriented research.

3. McNiff, J. (2017). Action Research: All You Need to Know (1st ed.) . SAGE Publications.

This book by Jean McNiff provides a comprehensive guide to conducting action research projects. It covers the key steps of the action research process, including identifying a problem, developing an action plan, implementing changes, and reflecting on the outcomes. The book is influential in the field of action research as it offers practical advice and strategies for practitioners across various disciplines, such as education, healthcare, and organizational development. It emphasizes the importance of critical reflection, collaboration, and the integration of theory and practice, making it a valuable resource for those seeking to engage in rigorous, transformative research.

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

What is a primary characteristic of action research in UX design?

It drives practical changes through iterative cycles.
It focuses solely on theoretical knowledge.
It relies on external consultants to dictate changes.

Which type of action research improves system efficiency and effectiveness?

Collaborative Action Research
Critical Reflection Action Research
Technical Action Research

What role do stakeholders play in collaborative action research?

They participate actively in co-creating solutions.
They provide financial support only.
They review and approve final designs.

How do users in action research benefit the design process?

They help make sure designs meet actual user needs and preferences.
They help speed up the design process significantly.
They limit the scope of design innovations.

What is the purpose of the reflection stage in the action research process?

To document the research process for publication only
To evaluate the effectiveness of actions and plan further improvements
To finalize the product design without further changes

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Literature on Action Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on Action Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Action Research

Take a deep dive into Action Research with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

All open-source articles on Action Research

An Introduction to Action Research

8 years ago

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Action Research: What it is, Stages & Examples

Action research is a method often used to make the situation better. It combines activity and investigation to make change happen.

The best way to get things accomplished is to do it yourself. This statement is utilized in corporations, community projects, and national governments. These organizations are relying on action research to cope with their continuously changing and unstable environments as they function in a more interdependent world.

In practical educational contexts, this involves using systematic inquiry and reflective practice to address real-world challenges, improve teaching and learning, enhance student engagement, and drive positive changes within the educational system.

This post outlines the definition of action research, its stages, and some examples.

Content Index

What is action research?

Stages of action research, the steps to conducting action research, examples of action research, advantages and disadvantages of action research.

Action research is a strategy that tries to find realistic solutions to organizations’ difficulties and issues. It is similar to applied research.

Action research refers basically learning by doing. First, a problem is identified, then some actions are taken to address it, then how well the efforts worked are measured, and if the results are not satisfactory, the steps are applied again.

It can be put into three different groups:

Positivist: This type of research is also called “classical action research.” It considers research a social experiment. This research is used to test theories in the actual world.
Interpretive: This kind of research is called “contemporary action research.” It thinks that business reality is socially made, and when doing this research, it focuses on the details of local and organizational factors.
Critical: This action research cycle takes a critical reflection approach to corporate systems and tries to enhance them.

All research is about learning new things. Collaborative action research contributes knowledge based on investigations in particular and frequently useful circumstances. It starts with identifying a problem. After that, the research process is followed by the below stages:

Stage 1: Plan

For an action research project to go well, the researcher needs to plan it well. After coming up with an educational research topic or question after a research study, the first step is to develop an action plan to guide the research process. The research design aims to address the study’s question. The research strategy outlines what to undertake, when, and how.

Stage 2: Act

The next step is implementing the plan and gathering data. At this point, the researcher must select how to collect and organize research data . The researcher also needs to examine all tools and equipment before collecting data to ensure they are relevant, valid, and comprehensive.

Stage 3: Observe

Data observation is vital to any investigation. The action researcher needs to review the project’s goals and expectations before data observation. This is the final step before drawing conclusions and taking action.

Different kinds of graphs, charts, and networks can be used to represent the data. It assists in making judgments or progressing to the next stage of observing.

Stage 4: Reflect

This step involves applying a prospective solution and observing the results. It’s essential to see if the possible solution found through research can really solve the problem being studied.

The researcher must explore alternative ideas when the action research project’s solutions fail to solve the problem.

Action research is a systematic approach researchers, educators, and practitioners use to identify and address problems or challenges within a specific context. It involves a cyclical process of planning, implementing, reflecting, and adjusting actions based on the data collected. Here are the general steps involved in conducting an action research process:

Identify the action research question or problem

Clearly define the issue or problem you want to address through your research. It should be specific, actionable, and relevant to your working context.

Review existing knowledge

Conduct a literature review to understand what research has already been done on the topic. This will help you gain insights, identify gaps, and inform your research design.

Plan the research

Develop a research plan outlining your study’s objectives, methods, data collection tools, and timeline. Determine the scope of your research and the participants or stakeholders involved.

Collect data

Implement your research plan by collecting relevant data. This can involve various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, document analysis, or focus groups. Ensure that your data collection methods align with your research objectives and allow you to gather the necessary information.

Analyze the data

Once you have collected the data, analyze it using appropriate qualitative or quantitative techniques. Look for patterns, themes, or trends in the data that can help you understand the problem better.

Reflect on the findings

Reflect on the analyzed data and interpret the results in the context of your research question. Consider the implications and possible solutions that emerge from the data analysis. This reflection phase is crucial for generating insights and understanding the underlying factors contributing to the problem.

Develop an action plan

Based on your analysis and reflection, develop an action plan that outlines the steps you will take to address the identified problem. The plan should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART goals). Consider involving relevant stakeholders in planning to ensure their buy-in and support.

Implement the action plan

Put your action plan into practice by implementing the identified strategies or interventions. This may involve making changes to existing practices, introducing new approaches, or testing alternative solutions. Document the implementation process and any modifications made along the way.

Evaluate and monitor progress

Continuously monitor and evaluate the impact of your actions. Collect additional data, assess the effectiveness of the interventions, and measure progress towards your goals. This evaluation will help you determine if your actions have the desired effects and inform any necessary adjustments.

Reflect and iterate

Reflect on the outcomes of your actions and the evaluation results. Consider what worked well, what did not, and why. Use this information to refine your approach, make necessary adjustments, and plan for the next cycle of action research if needed.

Remember that participatory action research is an iterative process, and multiple cycles may be required to achieve significant improvements or solutions to the identified problem. Each cycle builds on the insights gained from the previous one, fostering continuous learning and improvement.

Explore Insightfully Contextual Inquiry in Qualitative Research

Here are two real-life examples of action research.

Action research initiatives are frequently situation-specific. Still, other researchers can adapt the techniques. The example is from a researcher’s (Franklin, 1994) report about a project encouraging nature tourism in the Caribbean.

In 1991, this was launched to study how nature tourism may be implemented on the four Windward Islands in the Caribbean: St. Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, and St. Vincent.

For environmental protection, a government-led action study determined that the consultation process needs to involve numerous stakeholders, including commercial enterprises.

First, two researchers undertook the study and held search conferences on each island. The search conferences resulted in suggestions and action plans for local community nature tourism sub-projects.

Several islands formed advisory groups and launched national awareness and community projects. Regional project meetings were held to discuss experiences, self-evaluations, and strategies. Creating a documentary about a local initiative helped build community. And the study was a success, leading to a number of changes in the area.

Lau and Hayward (1997) employed action research to analyze Internet-based collaborative work groups.

Over two years, the researchers facilitated three action research problem -solving cycles with 15 teachers, project personnel, and 25 health practitioners from diverse areas. The goal was to see how Internet-based communications might affect their virtual workgroup.

First, expectations were defined, technology was provided, and a bespoke workgroup system was developed. Participants suggested shorter, more dispersed training sessions with project-specific instructions.

The second phase saw the system’s complete deployment. The final cycle witnessed system stability and virtual group formation. The key lesson was that the learning curve was poorly misjudged, with frustrations only marginally met by phone-based technical help. According to the researchers, the absence of high-quality online material about community healthcare was harmful.

Role clarity, connection building, knowledge sharing, resource assistance, and experiential learning are vital for virtual group growth. More study is required on how group support systems might assist groups in engaging with their external environment and boost group members’ learning.

Action research has both good and bad points.

It is very flexible, so researchers can change their analyses to fit their needs and make individual changes.
It offers a quick and easy way to solve problems that have been going on for a long time instead of complicated, long-term solutions based on complex facts.
If It is done right, it can be very powerful because it can lead to social change and give people the tools to make that change in ways that are important to their communities.

Disadvantages

These studies have a hard time being generalized and are hard to repeat because they are so flexible. Because the researcher has the power to draw conclusions, they are often not thought to be theoretically sound.
Setting up an action study in an ethical way can be hard. People may feel like they have to take part or take part in a certain way.
It is prone to research errors like selection bias , social desirability bias, and other cognitive biases.

LEARN ABOUT: Self-Selection Bias

This post discusses how action research generates knowledge, its steps, and real-life examples. It is very applicable to the field of research and has a high level of relevance. We can only state that the purpose of this research is to comprehend an issue and find a solution to it.

At QuestionPro, we give researchers tools for collecting data, like our survey software, and a library of insights for any long-term study. Go to the Insight Hub if you want to see a demo or learn more about it.

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Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ’s)

Action research is a systematic approach to inquiry that involves identifying a problem or challenge in a practical context, implementing interventions or changes, collecting and analyzing data, and using the findings to inform decision-making and drive positive change.

Action research can be conducted by various individuals or groups, including teachers, administrators, researchers, and educational practitioners. It is often carried out by those directly involved in the educational setting where the research takes place.

The steps of action research typically include identifying a problem, reviewing relevant literature, designing interventions or changes, collecting and analyzing data, reflecting on findings, and implementing improvements based on the results.

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PMC8240599.1 ; 2021 May 7
➤ PMC8240599.2; 2021 Jun 15

Application of action research in the field of healthcare: a scoping review protocol

1 UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery & Health Systems, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

David Coghlan

2 Trinity Business School, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Áine Carroll

3 School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

4 National Rehabilitation Hospital, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, Ireland

Diarmuid Stokes

5 The Library, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

Kinley Roberts

Geralyn hynes.

6 School of Nursing & Midwifery, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Associated Data

No data are associated with this article.

Version Changes

Revised. amendments from version 1.

We received feedback from two very helpful experts in the field of action research and action learning. There were a few minor changes that we made in the light of this feedback as seen hereunder. We see all action research as involving change, action, and reflection which is thus transformational and transformative in some way. We further elaborated slightly on the description of stage 5 to emphasise that there is no extant quality appraisal checklist for action research studies and that our findings will contribute to future development. We justified our choice of action research framework on the basis that the framework by Coghlan and Shani (2018) expresses the essential relationships between context, quality of relationships, has a dual focus on the inquiry and implementation process as well as concern for the actionability and contribution to knowledge creation. These four factors comprise a comprehensive framework as they capture the core of action research and the complex cause-and-effect dynamics within each factor and between the factors. We interpret the explanatory definition of organisational context as described by Coghlan and Shani (2018) to include community healthcare context which is also seen as community care context in healthcare parlance. Therefore, our search will pick up CBPR. We have clarified that participative values are embodied within the relational component of the action research and added an additional reference. We have also justified the inclusion of a particular focus on measurement of the degree of participation as in some publications the inclusion of stakeholders in interviews and focus groups only, is taken as essentially constituting the entire spectrum of the core values of participation and inclusion of the quality of the co-researcher partnership.

Peer Review Summary

Background: Traditional research approaches are increasingly challenged in healthcare contexts as they produce abstract thinking rather than practical application. In this regard, action research is a growing area of popularity and interest, essentially because of its dual focus on theory and action. However, there is a need for action researchers not only to justify their research approach but also to demonstrate the quality of their empirical studies. Therefore, the authors set out to examine the current status of the quality of extant action research studies in healthcare to encourage improved scholarship in this area. The aim of this scoping review is to identify, explore and map the literature regarding the application of action research in either individual, group or organisational domains in any healthcare context.

Methods: The systematic scoping review will search the literature within the databases of CINAHL, PubMed and ABI/Inform within the recent five-year period to investigate the scientific evidence of the quality of action research studies in healthcare contexts. The review will be guided by Arksey and O'Malley’s five mandatory steps, which have been updated and published online by the Joanna Briggs Institute. The review will follow the PRISMA-ScR framework guidelines to ensure the standard of the methodological and reporting approaches are exemplary.

Conclusion: This paper outlines the protocol for an exploratory scoping review to systematically and comprehensively map out the evidence as to whether action research studies demonstrate explicitly how the essential factors of a comprehensive framework of action research are upheld. The review will summarise the evidence on the quality of current action research studies in healthcare. It is anticipated that the findings will inform future action researchers in designing studies to ensure the quality of the studies is upheld.

Introduction

The utility and versatility of action research has brought about an increase in the level of interest, application and usage of action research in a variety of healthcare contexts in the past 20 years as healthcare systems all over the world undergo transformative change. Part of this greater interest and usage relates to the fact that in this context of change, action research aims at both taking action in a particular system in response to particular forces, and therefore brings a change, and creating knowledge about that action that provides actionable knowledge for other health care organisations. Another possible explanation for the increased application of action research in healthcare is its participatory paradigm, which invites participants to be both embedded and reflexive in the creation of collaborative learning and of actionable knowledge where research is with, rather than on or for, people. Action research therefore attempts to link theory and practice, thinking and doing, achieving both practical and research objectives ( Casey & Coghlan, 2021 ), and therefore provides a means of improvement by narrowing the gap between researching and implementing.

A wide range of terms are used to describe action research approaches such that it is now considered as a family of approaches ( Casey et al. , 2018 ), the common approaches being appreciative inquiry, co-operative inquiry, collaborative research, participatory action research and, more recently, co-design to name a few. The action research process involves engagement in cycles of action and reflection and always involves two goals: to address a real issue and to contribute to science through the elaboration or development of theory. These are the dual imperatives of action research. The creation of actionable knowledge is the most rigorous test of knowledge creation. Action research embodies a set of principles and outlines definite steps on how to engage in the research process. These steps are cyclical and spiral in nature and iterative and some argue that two overlapping spirals of activity exist, where one spiral depicts the research activity and the other depicts the work interest ( Casey & Coghlan, 2021 ). This facilitates the researchers giving adequate consideration to their own learning and knowledge as well as to all the relevant issues prior to engaging in research activity. Thus the researchers are engaging in developmental reflexivity and adopt a critical stance on their role throughout the action research project ( Bradbury et al. , 2019 ). According to Reason & Bradbury (2008:4) action research “is a living, emergent process that cannot be predetermined but changes and develops as those who engage deepen their understanding of the issues to be addressed and develop their capacity as co-inquirers both individually and collectively’.

In one of his seminal articles on action research, Lewin (1947: 147-8) describes how action research begins and develops.

Planned social action (intentional change) usually emerges from a more or less vague “idea”. An objective appears in the cloudy form of a dream or a wish, which can hardly be called a goal. To become real, to be able to steer action, something has to be developed which might be called a plan... It should be noted that the development of a general plan presupposes “fact-finding” … On the basis of this fact-finding the goal is somewhat altered…Accepting a plan does not mean that all further steps are fixed by a decision; only in regard to the first step should be the decision be final. After the first action is carried out, the second step should not follow automatically. Instead it should be investigated whether the effect of the first action was actually what was expected.

Keeping a regular check on how the inquiry process is unfolding and checking for the presence of any underlying assumptions with the group is essential ( Coughlan & Coghlan, 2002 ).

Participation as a core value in action research

Action research has its focus on generating solutions to practical problems and its ability to empower practitioners because of its emphasis on participation as a core strategy ( Reason, 1994 ) and implementation of action ( Meyer, 2000 ). Active participation in a research study can be more threatening than participation in the traditional designs and there are increasing calls for evidence of impact and outcome from participation and co-design ( Palmer, 2020 ). Participation in healthcare is rendered complex by the different lens through which different professional groups view and understand problems through different disciplinary lens while patients must engage with these against a hierarchical background. Participation has thus been described as a multivoiced process ( Hynes et al. , 2012 ) and embraces multiple ways of knowing-for-action ( Bradbury et al. , 2019 ). Indeed, there is an expectation that participation from participants and co-researchers increases involvement and commitment and sustainability of action research outcomes; however, the measurement of this has been inconsistent and almost absent. In some published accounts we have seen the inclusion of stakeholders in interviews and focus groups only, as essentially constituting the entire spectrum of the core values of participation and inclusion of the quality of the co-researcher partnership. Indeed, there is an expectation that participation from participants and co-researchers increases involvement and commitment and sustainability of action research outcomes; however, the measurement of this has been inconsistent and almost absent. For this reason we have opted to look at the degree of participation that is evidenced in the empirical studies using the ladder of citizen participation ( Arnstein, 1969 ), which although based on citizen participation in model cities in a department of housing and urban development, can form the basis for a more enlightened conversation about the type of participation evident in the selected studies. The ladder is organised into three major positions on citizen participation along a continuum of citizen control based on the concept of ability to exercise power. The ladder has eight rungs, with the bottom two rungs representing non-participation labelled as ‘therapy’ and ‘manipulation’. The middle section is labelled ‘degrees of tokenism’ and includes three rungs called ‘informing’, ‘consultation’ and ‘placation’ in ascending order. The higher rungs indicate three degrees of citizen power ranging from ‘partnership’ at the lower level, followed by ‘delegated power’, and ‘citizen control’ as the top rung of the ladder.

Indicating the quality of action research studies

Action researchers do not make claims “so much on the grounds of scientific rigour, as in terms of generating findings which are useful and relevant" ( Hart & Bond, 1995:13 ). Baskerville & Wood-Harper (1996:238) suggest that “where the change is successful, the evaluation must critically question whether the undertaken action, among the myriad routine and non-routine organisational actions, was the sole cause of success”. According to Waterman (1998:104) , “the validity of action research projects does not reside in their degree to effect change but in their attempt to improve people’s lives...through voluntary participation and cooperation”. According to Ellis & Kiely (2000:87) the validity of the research is based on the degree to which the research is useful and relevant in precipitating discussion about improvement. Morrison & Lilford (2001:441) suggest the search for knowledge can be considered scientific “if it leads to the development of theories that are explanatory: telling us why things happen as they do in that domain, comprehensively applying to the whole domain, and falsifiability: giving rise, via testable hypotheses, to empirical predictions whose persistent failure counts against the theory”. They conclude action research offers explanatory theories, and that these theories can be falsified. However, they attest these theories are context dependent and hence cannot be comprehensive.

Reason & Bradbury (2001) prefer to use the term quality rather than validity in action research as a means of expressing and judging rigour. They suggest the judge for quality action research be on the basis that it develops a praxis of relational knowledge and knowledge generation reflects co-operation between the researcher and participants. These authors also ask whether the research is guided by a reflexive concern for practical outcomes and whether the process of iterative reflection as part of the change process is readily apparent. Therefore, action research must acknowledge multiple realities and a plurality of knowing evident in the inclusion of various perspectives from the participants without attempting to find an agreed common perspective. The significance of the project is also an important aspect of quality criteria and whether the project results in new developments such as sustainable change. A framework that expresses these essential relationships between context, quality of relationships, has a dual focus on the inquiry and implementation process as well as concern for the actionability and contribution to knowledge creation was selected. Such a framework exists in the work of Shani & Pasmore (1985/2016) who suggest that the necessary evidence of the quality of their action research studies can be achieved by: i) demonstrating knowledge of the practical and academic context of the project; ii) creating participants as co-researchers; iii) enacting cycles of action and reflection as the project is being implemented and knowledge is being co-generated; and iv) generating outcomes that are both practical for the delivery of healthcare system in the project and robust for theory development about change in healthcare. A comprehensive framework of the action research process is presented by Coghlan & Shani (2018) in terms of four factors. These four factors comprise a comprehensive framework as they capture the core of action research and the complex cause-and-effect dynamics within each factor and between the factors.

The context of the action research project refers to individual, organisational, environmental and research/consulting factors. Individual factors include ideas about the direction of the project and how collaboration can be assured. From an organisational perspective, the availability and use of resources influence of previous history, and the level of congruence between these impacts on the capability for participation. Environmental factors in the global and local economies provide the larger context in which action research takes place. An example of research factors which can have relevance relates to previous research experience and involvement a similar area or topic.
The quality of relationship refers to trust, shared language, concern for each other and equality of influence between members and researchers.
Refers to the dual focus on both the inquiry process and the implementation process as they are being undertaken.
The dual outcomes of action research are some level of organisational improvement and learning and the creation of actionable knowledge.

These four factors will be used for the scoping review. A scoping review is the most appropriate approach to the literature as it provides an overview of studies, clarifying concepts or contextual information ( Pollack et al ., 2021 ) and it can be used to investigate research conduct ( Munn et al ., 2018 ; Tricco et al ., 2018 ). This aim of this scoping review is to explore whether action research studies demonstrate explicitly how the essential factors of a comprehensive framework of action research are upheld. This is a scoping protocol for this review. Our protocol includes information about the aims and objectives of the scoping review, inclusion and exclusion criteria, search strategy and data extraction.

The protocol for the scoping review is based on the work of Arksey & O' Malley (2005) . In addition, The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) ( Tricco et al ., 2018 ) will guide the process. This reporting guideline is consistent with the JBI guidance for scoping reviews, ( Tricco et al. , 2018 ). These steps are:

Stage 1 : Identifying the research question

Stage 2: Identifying relevant studies

Stage 3: study selection, stage 4: charting the data.

Stage 5: Collating, summarising and reporting results

Stage 1: Identifying the research question

The review aims to identify, explore and map the literature regarding the application of action research in either individual, group or organisational domains in any healthcare context.

Objectives . To identify the degree to which the core factors of a comprehensive framework of action research ( Coghlan & Shani, 2018 ) are manifestly addressed. The following are the key objectives of the scoping review:

1. To identify the degree to which knowledge of the practical and academic context are addressed.
2. To establish how the quality of co-researcher relationships was maintained.
3. To determine how the quality of the enactment of cycles of action and reflection in the present tense were implemented.
4. To identify how the dual outcomes of co-generated actionable knowledge are addressed.

Review question . How do researchers address the core factors of a comprehensive framework of action research in healthcare?

According to Peters et al. (2020b) , a scoping review question should include elements of the PCC mnemonic (population, concept, and context) and it will also inform inclusion and exclusion criteria and consequently the literature search strategy.

Population - healthcare professionals and patients and clients who work or come into contact with health care in any context of primary, secondary or tertiary settings
Concept - studies that use an action research approach in healthcare contexts.
Context - any part of health service in any country that people (healthcare professionals and patients or clients) interact with.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria . The inclusion and exclusion criteria for study selection are summarised in Table 1 .

The research team will undertake a comprehensive search of the literature within the following databases:

CINAHL - Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL Plus)
PubMed – Biomedical and life sciences database
ABI/Inform (ProQuest) – Business database

Using the three terms of population, concept, context (PCC framework) an initial search will be deployed on CINAHL Plus. This will be followed by the use of search terms to identify key text words used to address the major concepts of population (healthcare professionals and patients), concept (action research studies in healthcare), and context (any part of health service that people interact with). Alternative terms for each of the concepts will also be included. Then each search strategy will be adapted for each database (PubMed and ABI/Inform) and specific Boolean operators, truncation markers, and MeSH headings where necessary will be used. The inclusion of the expertise of a research librarian is invaluable at an early stage of completing a scoping review ( McGowan et al. , 2020 ); the research team worked with the expert university librarian in designing and refining the search strategy and will be included as part of the research team. We noted that while the data bases CINAHL and ABI/Inform claim to include the Action Research Journal, this is not the case. Therefore, we plan to do a manual search of the Action Research Journal and also of Educational Action Research for the past 5 years in keeping with the timeframe of the search strategy for this protocol. Sample search terms for the PubMed database are outlined in Table 2 .

Key search concepts . The key search concepts for this study are ‘people in healthcare’ AND ‘action research’ AND ‘healthcare environment’.

Endnote 9 will be used to manage the identified studies from the three databases. All duplicates will be removed within Endnote 9. The process of screening the titles and abstracts will be undertaken by four members of the team and non-relevant studies based on the criteria will be removed with the assistance of Rayyan (an online open access screening software tool). To resolve any conflict regarding the difference of opinion and in the ‘undecided, category, one member from the other team will chair a discussion to reach a consensus agreement. To improve reliability of the reviewers, a short training programme on the use of Rayyan will be undertaken by all the researchers and a small percentage of the studies will be screened independently by each reviewer and then a comparison will be reviewed for consistency of decision-making between the members. The full text article review will be undertaken by the same researchers using the same iterative steps, with the researchers reviewing the full texts independently.

We will do a small pilot study to test the use of the criteria and these can be modified as the researchers become more familiar with a sample of the studies to determine if further information is required of if fields are not relevant and should be removed. Data will be extracted using specified criteria and evidence from this process will be presented in table format.

Four members of the research team will be involved in extracting the data using a charting table created by the researchers within Microsoft Excel 365 software, as suggested by Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) ( Peters et al. , 2017 ). The extracted data will be selected and mapped according to the specified inclusion of evidence of the quality of the action research study. Using the elements identified in the PCC framework as a guide, the initial fields will include:

Citation details (authors and year of publication)
Study title
Geographical location of study
Study setting/context
Methodology/design – Type of action research
▪ knowledge of the practical and academic context,
▪ quality of co-researcher relationships,
▪ quality of the enactment of cycles of action and reflection in the present tense,
▪ the dual outcomes of co-generated actionable knowledge.
▪ Citizen power (citizen control, delegated power, partnership)
▪ Tokenism (placation, consultation, informing)
▪ Non-participation (therapy, manipulation)

Stage 5: Collating, summarising and reporting the results

Data will be collected using Microsoft Excel 365 software to capture relevant information for each study by the same four members of the research team and it will be available to all members via a shared drive. Studies will be mapped according to their contextual setting, geographical location, and year of publication. All authors will discuss the data prior to analysis, which will be a descriptive analysis, as recommended by Peters et al. (2020a) . A narrative tabular report will be produced summarising the extracted data concerning the objectives and scoping review question. The PRISMA-ScR guidelines will be used for reporting the outcomes of the review ( Tricco et al. , 2018 ). Quality appraisal of the studies will not be conducted as there is no extant quality appraisal check list for action research studies. This review aims to explore how the core factors of a comprehensive framework of action research are addressed in each study and our findings will contribute to future development of such a check list for the application of action research principles in action research studies in general. The review will consist of analysis of the evidence of the quality of their action research on: i) demonstrating knowledge of the practical and academic context of the project; ii) creating participants as co-researchers; iii) enacting cycles of action and reflection in the present tense as the project is being implemented and knowledge is being co-generated; and iv) generating outcomes that are both practical for the delivery of healthcare system in the project and robust for theory development about change in healthcare. Full adherence to ethical procedures in disseminating information will be undertaken by the research team. The report will be presented both orally and through publications at national and international conferences.

Study status

At the time of publication of this protocol, preliminary database searches had commenced.

This scoping review protocol has been designed in line with the latest evidence. Action research studies were carried out in diverse healthcare settings and there are many ways of undertaking action research in healthcare that consider the research purpose, aims and theoretical underpinnings. However, there is a need demonstrate the quality of the action research studies by choosing a coherent theoretical guidance provided by scholars. This will enable the transformation and impact of action research in healthcare settings to be evaluated and thereby improve the quality of action research studies in healthcare. The results extracted from this scoping review will identify how the quality element is addressed in current empirical action research studies within a recent five-year period. Based on the outcome of the review knowledge gaps and deficits will be uncovered in relation to demonstrating adherence to quality criteria when undertaking action research studies. A Quality check list for action research studies may be generated similar in format to extant reporting criteria for qualitative and quantitative studies. Findings from the review will be shared widely with healthcare personnel both locally and nationally and also through presentations and publication of the review in an open-access journal.

Data availability

[version 2; peer review: 2 approved]

Funding Statement

The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.

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Reviewer response for version 2

Victor friedman.

1 Action Research Center for Social Justice, Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Emek Yezreel, Israel

The changes to the article are sufficient.

Is the study design appropriate for the research question?

Is the rationale for, and objectives of, the study clearly described?

Are sufficient details of the methods provided to allow replication by others?

Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?

Not applicable

Reviewer Expertise:

Action research, organisational learning, social inclusion, conflict transformation, action science, field theory

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

UCD Nursing, Midwifery & Health Systems, Ireland

Many thanks for your considered response that has helped us to improve our publication.

Kind Regards

Reviewer response for version 1

This paper presents a protocol for a scoping literature review of how action research in health care deals with quality. It argues for the need for such a review, which promises to provide a deeper, more nuanced, and empirically based understanding of what quality actually means in action research in the health care field. The paper reviews a small sample of the literature on quality in action research and points to a variety of criteria/factors for evaluating/generating quality. For their scoping review, the authors choose “four factors” for quality as presented by Coghlan and Shani (2018). The paper then presents the research question, the methods to be used for (1) identifying and selecting relevant studies to be reviewed, (2) charting the data, and (3) collating, summarising and reporting the results.

The paper makes a convincing argument for the need for such a scoping review and prevents a very clear, systematic, and well though-out protocol that should generate very useful and important knowledge.

At the same time, I question the authors choice of a single, pre-existing framework for quality (Coghlan & Shani,2018). After presenting a number of varying approaches to quality, they write, “a connection that integrates their different forms of expertise and different initial frameworks is needed in order to generate a third framework of the local situation.” However, the authors do not actually explain how these frameworks are integrated within the Coghlan and Shani (2018) model. It seems to me that some things are missing or need to be developed a bit more:

Making a specific reference to the issues of reflection/reflexivity, which are featured in the literature reviewed earlier in the paper. These are not the same processes, though they related, and are an important component of action research.
The Coghlan & Shani (2018) framework is very heavily oriented towards action research in organizations. Making a specific reference to the issue of “community,” which is a central domain in health care but is missing from the “Context” part of the framework. It does appear in Table 2. Regarding Table 2, I would add “Community Based (Participatory Research (CBPR or CBR)” to “Concept” (studies that use an action research approach in healthcare contexts).
“Participation” appears as a separate category outside of the framework. However, participation is applied implied in the Coghlan and Shani (2018) model by “equality of influence between members and researchers” in the “quality of relationships” (factor 3). How does quality of relationships differ from participation? Perhaps participation cold be incorporated into the framework or the framework crafted to reduce redundancy.
I suggest that the authors take a look at the quality choice-points for action oriented research for transformation suggested by the (Bradbury et al, 2020), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1476750320904562 . )

To sum up, Coghlan & Shani (2018) provides a very good foundation on which to build the integrative model, but a bit more work needs to be done to make it integrative and more comprehensive.

There are also a number of editing issues:

The authors write: “Therefore, a connection that integrates their different forms of expertise and different initial frameworks is needed in order to generate a third framework of the local situation.” What is meant by “third framework”? What were the first and second frameworks?
The very next sentence says “Such a frame exists”. This confuses a bit more since “framework” and “frame” are not the same
The authors write: “Individual factors include ideas about the direction and collaboration can be assured.” There is something missing in this sentence. I think it should say “ideas about how the…” but that’s up to the authors
The authors write: “From an organisational perspective, the availability and use of resources influence of previous history, and the level of congruence between these impacts on the capability for participation.” There is something missing in this sentence as well. I think there needs to be a comma: “use of resources, influence of previous history and…"
The authors write: “Based on the outcome of the review knowledge gaps and deficits will be uncovered in relation to demonstrating adherence to quality criteria when undertaking action research studies.” I think there is a missing comma and should read: Based on the outcome of the review, knowledge gaps…

Finally, I want to raise a thought I had about the relationship between action research and academic writing that may, or may not, be relevant to this project and the protocol. Understandably, the authors exclude research that lacks “information and descriptions on the core tenets of action research”. However, as an associate editor of the Acton Research Journal and a frequent reviewer of action research papers, I am often struck by the difference between doing action research and writing about it for academic journals. Unlike normal research, which can be planned and controlled to a high degree, action research, by its very nature as a participative process, is emergent and responsive to changing situations, rarely actually occurring according to “plan.” Sometimes I read manuscripts that are based on quite interesting and high quality action research, but this research is not framed or presented in a way that meets academic standards. Writing up action research for academic journals is often a post hoc reflective process that addresses the question “What did we learn from this project? What kind of knowledge did we produce?” In my experience, many manuscripts fail because they do not adequately frame a question, connect with the relevant literature, or adequately present the data to back up their claims. All of these problems have more to with writing than with the action research itself. In this respect, I believe that this project looks not so much at the quality of action research as the quality of action research as reflected in academic writing. I am not sure how important this distinction is, if at all, but I did want to put it on the table.

I wish the authors all the best in carrying out this important study.

action research, organisational learning, social inclusion, conflict transformation, action science, field theory

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.

Brendan McCormack

1 Centre for Person-Centred Practice Research, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, Musselburgh, UK

Thanks for asking me to review this protocol. It is great to see this work happen and it is to be welcomed, as it is needed. Generally the protocol is really thorough and is very clear and should produce some good outcomes.

A couple of comments:

The focus is interesting to me. You clearly set out what 'counts' as action research, which includes 'co-design work in healthcare' (much of which I struggle to see as research at all!) but don't include transformational and transformative research which is usually theoretically and philosophically robust. That seems odd!
The databases to be searched don't include any educational or social science databases. Whilst I completely appreciate that health related publications in these databases are few, they are however places that health-focused action research gets published. I think these need to be included.
The methods are clearly set out and are very thorough. However I found the stage 5 of the methods to be 'vague' and I am not completely sure what the processes are and how standardised they are. I think these could be further clarified.
The dissemination ideas lack creativity and contemporary (non-academic publication focused) methods. These should be further considered.

Well done and I wish you luck with the project.

action research. participatory research. person-centred research. nursing and healthcare research

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Action Research: A catalyst for comprehensive teaching and learning in multilingual contexts

This WIDA Snapshot introduces classroom action research – when researchers and educators work together to address classroom challenges – by encouraging teachers to use their researcher voices to make meaningful contributions to the field, whether through collaborative or independent approaches.

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Action research is dynamic and participatory and has become a cornerstone of education research. It enables teachers understanding, analysis, and reflection to address classroom challenges, while building comprehensive and robust classroom teaching practices at the same time.

For example, scholars continually work with teachers on research initiatives that inform educational theoretical approaches. Beyond this, however, there is something inherently important about giving practitioners a voice in education research (Alrichter, 1993) and especially in language learning (Edwards & Burns, 2015).

What does action research look like for teachers who work with multilingual learners? Embracing multilingualism in the classroom requires awareness and understanding of students’ cross-cultural, social, cognitive, and economic benefits (Martinez, 2018). It also relies on practitioners making informed, evidence-based decisions to influence education for multilingual language development. The voices of practitioners are key to the development of education methods; hence scholars have provided multiple avenues to engage teachers in action research (Sagor, 2000; Burns, 2009).

WIDA’s work in language development has always focused on impact at the classroom level. To this end, practitioners can lay important groundwork to identify and implement strategies that are evidence-based. These practices also include systematically collecting and analyzing data and introducing practices to let teachers as practitioners engage in reflective processes. Letting practitioners gain insights on their work effectiveness and make the needed changes and adaptations is a win-win approach. Through its Marco DALE , Marco ALE and ELD Standards Framework , WIDA is offering not only resources that meet the diverse needs of bilingual learners in the classroom, but also themes that can be explored through action research. The results can then be used to inform changes and updates to instruction.

By pairing frameworks and classroom realities with action research, teachers can promote a student- and learning-centered approach, where we can directly address distinct types of challenges, including language barriers, various levels of language proficiency, diverse cultural backgrounds, and the task of building a more inclusive language learning experience. By providing a nuanced understanding of language development, we can empower our teachers to explore the complexities of language and spark curiosity related to concepts like translanguaging, transculturalism, multiliteracies, equity, and interaction into the curriculum to provide the needed learning supports.

A concrete example of action research has been my experience mentoring teachers in Croatia and Algeria, where we experimented with integrating technology (AI) and differentiated instruction to help us make decisions on levels of engagement, increasing motivation, making learning relatable and building a professional development approach through research to support teachers and learners. The framework we developed builds on achieving evidence-based, and culturally responsive teaching practices that are essential for shaping the new citizens of the world.

As a practitioner and now dedicated to research, I have seen the benefits that action research can have on simple things, including giving instructions, promoting engagement, and developing reflective practices among learners. Because of my background and 30-year career in education, I have seen firsthand how action research stands as a transformative tool for educators building empowerment and bridging theory and practice from those who know best: the teachers.

Action Research Plan

Want to get started? Keep in mind these ideas:

Action research is not a linear process
Focus on one specific classroom issue at a time
Develop a research question (or questions)
It helps to read the literature, talk to experts, or listen to others discuss the topic
Plan how to collect and analyze data
Create a potential roadmap and reflect on it frequently
Evaluate and readjust as necessary
Build a network of peer action researchers within your school or district

Remember: you will not only be contributing to addressing challenges in your classroom, but your work is a contribution to the field of language development and education in general.

About the Author

As researcher for WIDA Español, Grazzia Maria Mendoza facilitates research processes and the design of professional development resources through innovation, contextualization during implementation, and the promotion of complex, consistent and quality research.

Altrichter, H. (1993). The concept of quality in action research: Giving practitioners a voice in educational research. Qualitative Voices in Educational Research. Routledge.

Burns, A (2009). Doing Action Research in Language Teaching. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203863466

Edwards, E. & Burns, A. (2015). Language teacher action research: achieving sustainability. ELT Journal, 70(1), 6-15 https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccv060

Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34-46 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x

Martínez, R. A. (2018). Beyond the English learner label: Recognizing the richness of bi/multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires. The Reading Teacher, 71(5), 515-522. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1679

Miller, I. K., Cunha, M. I. A., & Allwright, D. (2021). Teachers as practitioners of learning: the lens of exploratory practice. Educational Action Research, 29(3), 447–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2020.1842780

Sagor, R. (2000). Guiding school improvement with action research. ASCD.

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Action Research

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J. Spencer Clark, Kansas State University

Suzanne Porath, Kansas State University

Julie Thiele, Kansas State University

Morgan Jobe, Kansas State University

Last Update: 2024

ISBN 13: 9781944548292

Publisher: New Prairie Press

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Introduction
About the Authors
What is Action Research for Classroom Teachers?
Action Research as a Process for Professional Learning and Leadership
Planning Your Research: Reviewing the Literature and Developing Questions
Preparing for Action Research in the Classroom: Practical Issues
Collecting Data in Your Classroom
Analyzing Data from Your Classroom
Let it Be Known! Sharing your Results
The Action Research Process from a High School ELA Teacher’s Perspective

Ancillary Material

About the book.

Action research is a common journey for graduate students in education and other human science fields. This book attempts to meet the needs of graduate students, in-service teachers, and any other educators interested in action research and/or self-study. The chapters of this book draw on our collective experiences as educators in a variety of educational contexts, and our roles guiding educator/researchers in various settings. All of our experiences have enabled us to question and refine our own understanding of action research as a process and means for pedagogical improvement. The primary purpose of this book is to offer clear steps and practical guidance to those who intend to carry out action research for the first time. As educators begin their action research journey, we feel it is vital to pose four questions: 1) What is action research, and how is it distinct from other educational research?; 2) When is it appropriate for an educator to conduct an action research project in their context?; 3) How does an educator conduct an action research project?; 4) What does an educator do with the data once the action research project has been conducted? We have attempted to address all four questions in the chapters of this book.

About the Contributors

J. Spencer Clark is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at Kansas State University. He has used action research methodology for the past 17 years, in K-12 schools and higher education. More recently, for the past 10 years he has taught action research methods to teachers in graduate and licensure degree programs. He also has led secondary student action research projects in Indiana, Utah, and Kansas. Clark also utilizes action research methodology in his own research. Much of his research has focused on understanding and developing teacher agency through clinical and professional learning experiences that utilize aspects of digital communication, inquiry, collaboration, and personalized learning. He has published in a variety of journals and edited books on teacher education, technology, inquiry-based learning, and curriculum development.

Suzanne Porath has been an English Language Arts, history, and humanities classroom teacher and reading teacher for 13 years before becoming a teacher educator. She has taught in Wisconsin and American international schools in Brazil, Lithuania, and Aruba when she conducted her own action research projects. Before accepting her current position as an assistant professor at Kansas State University in Curriculum and Instruction, she taught at Concordia University and Edgewood College in Wisconsin. She has taught action research methods at the graduate level and facilitated professional development through action research in school districts. She is the lead editor of Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research https://newprairiepress.org/networks/ .

Julie Thiele , PhD. is an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University. She teaches math education courses, math and science education courses and graduate research courses. Prior to teaching at KSU, she taught elementary and middle school, and led her district level professional learning community, focusing on implementing effective, research-based teaching practices.

Morgan M. Jobe is a program coordinator in the College of Education at Kansas State University, where she also earned a bachelor’s degree in secondary education and a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. Morgan taught high school English-Language Arts for ten years in two different Kansas school districts before returning to Kansas State University as a staff member. Her research interests include diversity and equity issues in public education, as well as action research in teacher education programs.

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1 What is Action Research for Classroom Teachers?

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

What is the nature of action research?
How does action research develop in the classroom?
What models of action research work best for your classroom?
What are the epistemological, ontological, theoretical underpinnings of action research?

Educational research provides a vast landscape of knowledge on topics related to teaching and learning, curriculum and assessment, students’ cognitive and affective needs, cultural and socio-economic factors of schools, and many other factors considered viable to improving schools. Educational stakeholders rely on research to make informed decisions that ultimately affect the quality of schooling for their students. Accordingly, the purpose of educational research is to engage in disciplined inquiry to generate knowledge on topics significant to the students, teachers, administrators, schools, and other educational stakeholders. Just as the topics of educational research vary, so do the approaches to conducting educational research in the classroom. Your approach to research will be shaped by your context, your professional identity, and paradigm (set of beliefs and assumptions that guide your inquiry). These will all be key factors in how you generate knowledge related to your work as an educator.

Action research is an approach to educational research that is commonly used by educational practitioners and professionals to examine, and ultimately improve, their pedagogy and practice. In this way, action research represents an extension of the reflection and critical self-reflection that an educator employs on a daily basis in their classroom. When students are actively engaged in learning, the classroom can be dynamic and uncertain, demanding the constant attention of the educator. Considering these demands, educators are often only able to engage in reflection that is fleeting, and for the purpose of accommodation, modification, or formative assessment. Action research offers one path to more deliberate, substantial, and critical reflection that can be documented and analyzed to improve an educator’s practice.

Purpose of Action Research

As one of many approaches to educational research, it is important to distinguish the potential purposes of action research in the classroom. This book focuses on action research as a method to enable and support educators in pursuing effective pedagogical practices by transforming the quality of teaching decisions and actions, to subsequently enhance student engagement and learning. Being mindful of this purpose, the following aspects of action research are important to consider as you contemplate and engage with action research methodology in your classroom:

Action research is a process for improving educational practice. Its methods involve action, evaluation, and reflection. It is a process to gather evidence to implement change in practices.
Action research is participative and collaborative. It is undertaken by individuals with a common purpose.
Action research is situation and context-based.
Action research develops reflection practices based on the interpretations made by participants.
Knowledge is created through action and application.
Action research can be based in problem-solving, if the solution to the problem results in the improvement of practice.
Action research is iterative; plans are created, implemented, revised, then implemented, lending itself to an ongoing process of reflection and revision.
In action research, findings emerge as action develops and takes place; however, they are not conclusive or absolute, but ongoing (Koshy, 2010, pgs. 1-2).

In thinking about the purpose of action research, it is helpful to situate action research as a distinct paradigm of educational research. I like to think about action research as part of the larger concept of living knowledge. Living knowledge has been characterized as “a quest for life, to understand life and to create… knowledge which is valid for the people with whom I work and for myself” (Swantz, in Reason & Bradbury, 2001, pg. 1). Why should educators care about living knowledge as part of educational research? As mentioned above, action research is meant “to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in the everyday conduct of their lives and to see that action research is about working towards practical outcomes” (Koshy, 2010, pg. 2). However, it is also about:

creating new forms of understanding, since action without reflection and understanding is blind, just as theory without action is meaningless. The participatory nature of action research makes it only possible with, for and by persons and communities, ideally involving all stakeholders both in the questioning and sense making that informs the research, and in the action, which is its focus. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001, pg. 2)

In an effort to further situate action research as living knowledge, Jean McNiff reminds us that “there is no such ‘thing’ as ‘action research’” (2013, pg. 24). In other words, action research is not static or finished, it defines itself as it proceeds. McNiff’s reminder characterizes action research as action-oriented, and a process that individuals go through to make their learning public to explain how it informs their practice. Action research does not derive its meaning from an abstract idea, or a self-contained discovery – action research’s meaning stems from the way educators negotiate the problems and successes of living and working in the classroom, school, and community.

While we can debate the idea of action research, there are people who are action researchers, and they use the idea of action research to develop principles and theories to guide their practice. Action research, then, refers to an organization of principles that guide action researchers as they act on shared beliefs, commitments, and expectations in their inquiry.

Reflection and the Process of Action Research

When an individual engages in reflection on their actions or experiences, it is typically for the purpose of better understanding those experiences, or the consequences of those actions to improve related action and experiences in the future. Reflection in this way develops knowledge around these actions and experiences to help us better regulate those actions in the future. The reflective process generates new knowledge regularly for classroom teachers and informs their classroom actions.

Unfortunately, the knowledge generated by educators through the reflective process is not always prioritized among the other sources of knowledge educators are expected to utilize in the classroom. Educators are expected to draw upon formal types of knowledge, such as textbooks, content standards, teaching standards, district curriculum and behavioral programs, etc., to gain new knowledge and make decisions in the classroom. While these forms of knowledge are important, the reflective knowledge that educators generate through their pedagogy is the amalgamation of these types of knowledge enacted in the classroom. Therefore, reflective knowledge is uniquely developed based on the action and implementation of an educator’s pedagogy in the classroom. Action research offers a way to formalize the knowledge generated by educators so that it can be utilized and disseminated throughout the teaching profession.

Research is concerned with the generation of knowledge, and typically creating knowledge related to a concept, idea, phenomenon, or topic. Action research generates knowledge around inquiry in practical educational contexts. Action research allows educators to learn through their actions with the purpose of developing personally or professionally. Due to its participatory nature, the process of action research is also distinct in educational research. There are many models for how the action research process takes shape. I will share a few of those here. Each model utilizes the following processes to some extent:

Plan a change;
Take action to enact the change;
Observe the process and consequences of the change;
Reflect on the process and consequences;
Act, observe, & reflect again and so on.

The basic process of Action Research is as follows: Plan a change; Take action to enact the change; Observe the process and consequences of the change; Reflect on the process and consequences; Act, observe, & reflect again and so on.

Figure 1.1 Basic action research cycle

There are many other models that supplement the basic process of action research with other aspects of the research process to consider. For example, figure 1.2 illustrates a spiral model of action research proposed by Kemmis and McTaggart (2004). The spiral model emphasizes the cyclical process that moves beyond the initial plan for change. The spiral model also emphasizes revisiting the initial plan and revising based on the initial cycle of research:

Kemmis and McTaggart (2004) offer a slightly different process for action research: Plan; Act & Observe; Reflect; Revised Plan; Act & Observe; Reflect.

Figure 1.2 Interpretation of action research spiral, Kemmis and McTaggart (2004, p. 595)

Other models of action research reorganize the process to emphasize the distinct ways knowledge takes shape in the reflection process. O’Leary’s (2004, p. 141) model, for example, recognizes that the research may take shape in the classroom as knowledge emerges from the teacher’s observations. O’Leary highlights the need for action research to be focused on situational understanding and implementation of action, initiated organically from real-time issues:

O'Leary (2004) offers another version of the action research process that focuses the cyclical nature of action research, with three cycles shown: Observe; Reflect; Plan; Act; And Repeat.

Figure 1.3 Interpretation of O’Leary’s cycles of research, O’Leary (2000, p. 141)

Lastly, Macintyre’s (2000, p. 1) model, offers a different characterization of the action research process. Macintyre emphasizes a messier process of research with the initial reflections and conclusions as the benchmarks for guiding the research process. Macintyre emphasizes the flexibility in planning, acting, and observing stages to allow the process to be naturalistic. Our interpretation of Macintyre process is below:

Macintyre (2000) offers a much more complex process of action research that highlights multiple processes happening at the same time. It starts with: Reflection and analysis of current practice and general idea of research topic and context. Second: Narrowing down the topic, planning the action; and scanning the literature, discussing with colleagues. Third: Refined topic – selection of key texts, formulation of research question/hypothesis, organization of refined action plan in context; and tentative action plan, consideration of different research strategies. Fourth: Evaluation of entire process; and take action, monitor effects – evaluation of strategy and research question/hypothesis and final amendments. Lastly: Conclusions, claims, explanations. Recommendations for further research.

Figure 1.4 Interpretation of the action research cycle, Macintyre (2000, p. 1)

We believe it is important to prioritize the flexibility of the process, and encourage you to only use these models as basic guides for your process. Your process may look similar, or you may diverge from these models as you better understand your students, context, and data.

Definitions of Action Research and Examples

At this point, it may be helpful for readers to have a working definition of action research and some examples to illustrate the methodology in the classroom. Bassey (1998, p. 93) offers a very practical definition and describes “action research as an inquiry which is carried out in order to understand, to evaluate and then to change, in order to improve educational practice.” Cohen and Manion (1994, p. 192) situate action research differently, and describe action research as emergent, writing:

essentially an on-the-spot procedure designed to deal with a concrete problem located in an immediate situation. This means that ideally, the step-by-step process is constantly monitored over varying periods of time and by a variety of mechanisms (questionnaires, diaries, interviews and case studies, for example) so that the ensuing feedback may be translated into modifications, adjustment, directional changes, redefinitions, as necessary, so as to bring about lasting benefit to the ongoing process itself rather than to some future occasion.

Lastly, Koshy (2010, p. 9) describes action research as:

a constructive inquiry, during which the researcher constructs his or her knowledge of specific issues through planning, acting, evaluating, refining and learning from the experience. It is a continuous learning process in which the researcher learns and also shares the newly generated knowledge with those who may benefit from it.

These definitions highlight the distinct features of action research and emphasize the purposeful intent of action researchers to improve, refine, reform, and problem-solve issues in their educational context. To better understand the distinctness of action research, these are some examples of action research topics:

Examples of Action Research Topics

Flexible seating in 4th grade classroom to increase effective collaborative learning.
Structured homework protocols for increasing student achievement.
Developing a system of formative feedback for 8th grade writing.
Using music to stimulate creative writing.
Weekly brown bag lunch sessions to improve responses to PD from staff.
Using exercise balls as chairs for better classroom management.

Action Research in Theory

Action research-based inquiry in educational contexts and classrooms involves distinct participants – students, teachers, and other educational stakeholders within the system. All of these participants are engaged in activities to benefit the students, and subsequently society as a whole. Action research contributes to these activities and potentially enhances the participants’ roles in the education system. Participants’ roles are enhanced based on two underlying principles:

communities, schools, and classrooms are sites of socially mediated actions, and action research provides a greater understanding of self and new knowledge of how to negotiate these socially mediated environments;
communities, schools, and classrooms are part of social systems in which humans interact with many cultural tools, and action research provides a basis to construct and analyze these interactions.

In our quest for knowledge and understanding, we have consistently analyzed human experience over time and have distinguished between types of reality. Humans have constantly sought “facts” and “truth” about reality that can be empirically demonstrated or observed.

Social systems are based on beliefs, and generally, beliefs about what will benefit the greatest amount of people in that society. Beliefs, and more specifically the rationale or support for beliefs, are not always easy to demonstrate or observe as part of our reality. Take the example of an English Language Arts teacher who prioritizes argumentative writing in her class. She believes that argumentative writing demonstrates the mechanics of writing best among types of writing, while also providing students a skill they will need as citizens and professionals. While we can observe the students writing, and we can assess their ability to develop a written argument, it is difficult to observe the students’ understanding of argumentative writing and its purpose in their future. This relates to the teacher’s beliefs about argumentative writing; we cannot observe the real value of the teaching of argumentative writing. The teacher’s rationale and beliefs about teaching argumentative writing are bound to the social system and the skills their students will need to be active parts of that system. Therefore, our goal through action research is to demonstrate the best ways to teach argumentative writing to help all participants understand its value as part of a social system.

The knowledge that is conveyed in a classroom is bound to, and justified by, a social system. A postmodernist approach to understanding our world seeks knowledge within a social system, which is directly opposed to the empirical or positivist approach which demands evidence based on logic or science as rationale for beliefs. Action research does not rely on a positivist viewpoint to develop evidence and conclusions as part of the research process. Action research offers a postmodernist stance to epistemology (theory of knowledge) and supports developing questions and new inquiries during the research process. In this way action research is an emergent process that allows beliefs and decisions to be negotiated as reality and meaning are being constructed in the socially mediated space of the classroom.

Theorizing Action Research for the Classroom

All research, at its core, is for the purpose of generating new knowledge and contributing to the knowledge base of educational research. Action researchers in the classroom want to explore methods of improving their pedagogy and practice. The starting place of their inquiry stems from their pedagogy and practice, so by nature the knowledge created from their inquiry is often contextually specific to their classroom, school, or community. Therefore, we should examine the theoretical underpinnings of action research for the classroom. It is important to connect action research conceptually to experience; for example, Levin and Greenwood (2001, p. 105) make these connections:

Action research is context bound and addresses real life problems.
Action research is inquiry where participants and researchers cogenerate knowledge through collaborative communicative processes in which all participants’ contributions are taken seriously.
The meanings constructed in the inquiry process lead to social action or these reflections and action lead to the construction of new meanings.
The credibility/validity of action research knowledge is measured according to whether the actions that arise from it solve problems (workability) and increase participants’ control over their own situation.

Educators who engage in action research will generate new knowledge and beliefs based on their experiences in the classroom. Let us emphasize that these are all important to you and your work, as both an educator and researcher. It is these experiences, beliefs, and theories that are often discounted when more official forms of knowledge (e.g., textbooks, curriculum standards, districts standards) are prioritized. These beliefs and theories based on experiences should be valued and explored further, and this is one of the primary purposes of action research in the classroom. These beliefs and theories should be valued because they were meaningful aspects of knowledge constructed from teachers’ experiences. Developing meaning and knowledge in this way forms the basis of constructivist ideology, just as teachers often try to get their students to construct their own meanings and understandings when experiencing new ideas.

Classroom Teachers Constructing their Own Knowledge

Most of you are probably at least minimally familiar with constructivism, or the process of constructing knowledge. However, what is constructivism precisely, for the purposes of action research? Many scholars have theorized constructivism and have identified two key attributes (Koshy, 2010; von Glasersfeld, 1987):

Knowledge is not passively received, but actively developed through an individual’s cognition;
Human cognition is adaptive and finds purpose in organizing the new experiences of the world, instead of settling for absolute or objective truth.

Considering these two attributes, constructivism is distinct from conventional knowledge formation because people can develop a theory of knowledge that orders and organizes the world based on their experiences, instead of an objective or neutral reality. When individuals construct knowledge, there are interactions between an individual and their environment where communication, negotiation and meaning-making are collectively developing knowledge. For most educators, constructivism may be a natural inclination of their pedagogy. Action researchers have a similar relationship to constructivism because they are actively engaged in a process of constructing knowledge. However, their constructions may be more formal and based on the data they collect in the research process. Action researchers also are engaged in the meaning making process, making interpretations from their data. These aspects of the action research process situate them in the constructivist ideology. Just like constructivist educators, action researchers’ constructions of knowledge will be affected by their individual and professional ideas and values, as well as the ecological context in which they work (Biesta & Tedder, 2006). The relations between constructivist inquiry and action research is important, as Lincoln (2001, p. 130) states:

much of the epistemological, ontological, and axiological belief systems are the same or similar, and methodologically, constructivists and action researchers work in similar ways, relying on qualitative methods in face-to-face work, while buttressing information, data and background with quantitative method work when necessary or useful.

While there are many links between action research and educators in the classroom, constructivism offers the most familiar and practical threads to bind the beliefs of educators and action researchers.

Epistemology, Ontology, and Action Research

It is also important for educators to consider the philosophical stances related to action research to better situate it with their beliefs and reality. When researchers make decisions about the methodology they intend to use, they will consider their ontological and epistemological stances. It is vital that researchers clearly distinguish their philosophical stances and understand the implications of their stance in the research process, especially when collecting and analyzing their data. In what follows, we will discuss ontological and epistemological stances in relation to action research methodology.

Ontology, or the theory of being, is concerned with the claims or assumptions we make about ourselves within our social reality – what do we think exists, what does it look like, what entities are involved and how do these entities interact with each other (Blaikie, 2007). In relation to the discussion of constructivism, generally action researchers would consider their educational reality as socially constructed. Social construction of reality happens when individuals interact in a social system. Meaningful construction of concepts and representations of reality develop through an individual’s interpretations of others’ actions. These interpretations become agreed upon by members of a social system and become part of social fabric, reproduced as knowledge and beliefs to develop assumptions about reality. Researchers develop meaningful constructions based on their experiences and through communication. Educators as action researchers will be examining the socially constructed reality of schools. In the United States, many of our concepts, knowledge, and beliefs about schooling have been socially constructed over the last hundred years. For example, a group of teachers may look at why fewer female students enroll in upper-level science courses at their school. This question deals directly with the social construction of gender and specifically what careers females have been conditioned to pursue. We know this is a social construction in some school social systems because in other parts of the world, or even the United States, there are schools that have more females enrolled in upper level science courses than male students. Therefore, the educators conducting the research have to recognize the socially constructed reality of their school and consider this reality throughout the research process. Action researchers will use methods of data collection that support their ontological stance and clarify their theoretical stance throughout the research process.

Koshy (2010, p. 23-24) offers another example of addressing the ontological challenges in the classroom:

A teacher who was concerned with increasing her pupils’ motivation and enthusiasm for learning decided to introduce learning diaries which the children could take home. They were invited to record their reactions to the day’s lessons and what they had learnt. The teacher reported in her field diary that the learning diaries stimulated the children’s interest in her lessons, increased their capacity to learn, and generally improved their level of participation in lessons. The challenge for the teacher here is in the analysis and interpretation of the multiplicity of factors accompanying the use of diaries. The diaries were taken home so the entries may have been influenced by discussions with parents. Another possibility is that children felt the need to please their teacher. Another possible influence was that their increased motivation was as a result of the difference in style of teaching which included more discussions in the classroom based on the entries in the dairies.

Here you can see the challenge for the action researcher is working in a social context with multiple factors, values, and experiences that were outside of the teacher’s control. The teacher was only responsible for introducing the diaries as a new style of learning. The students’ engagement and interactions with this new style of learning were all based upon their socially constructed notions of learning inside and outside of the classroom. A researcher with a positivist ontological stance would not consider these factors, and instead might simply conclude that the dairies increased motivation and interest in the topic, as a result of introducing the diaries as a learning strategy.

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, signifies a philosophical view of what counts as knowledge – it justifies what is possible to be known and what criteria distinguishes knowledge from beliefs (Blaikie, 1993). Positivist researchers, for example, consider knowledge to be certain and discovered through scientific processes. Action researchers collect data that is more subjective and examine personal experience, insights, and beliefs.

Action researchers utilize interpretation as a means for knowledge creation. Action researchers have many epistemologies to choose from as means of situating the types of knowledge they will generate by interpreting the data from their research. For example, Koro-Ljungberg et al., (2009) identified several common epistemologies in their article that examined epistemological awareness in qualitative educational research, such as: objectivism, subjectivism, constructionism, contextualism, social epistemology, feminist epistemology, idealism, naturalized epistemology, externalism, relativism, skepticism, and pluralism. All of these epistemological stances have implications for the research process, especially data collection and analysis. Please see the table on pages 689-90, linked below for a sketch of these potential implications:

Again, Koshy (2010, p. 24) provides an excellent example to illustrate the epistemological challenges within action research:

A teacher of 11-year-old children decided to carry out an action research project which involved a change in style in teaching mathematics. Instead of giving children mathematical tasks displaying the subject as abstract principles, she made links with other subjects which she believed would encourage children to see mathematics as a discipline that could improve their understanding of the environment and historic events. At the conclusion of the project, the teacher reported that applicable mathematics generated greater enthusiasm and understanding of the subject.

The educator/researcher engaged in action research-based inquiry to improve an aspect of her pedagogy. She generated knowledge that indicated she had improved her students’ understanding of mathematics by integrating it with other subjects – specifically in the social and ecological context of her classroom, school, and community. She valued constructivism and students generating their own understanding of mathematics based on related topics in other subjects. Action researchers working in a social context do not generate certain knowledge, but knowledge that emerges and can be observed and researched again, building upon their knowledge each time.

Researcher Positionality in Action Research

In this first chapter, we have discussed a lot about the role of experiences in sparking the research process in the classroom. Your experiences as an educator will shape how you approach action research in your classroom. Your experiences as a person in general will also shape how you create knowledge from your research process. In particular, your experiences will shape how you make meaning from your findings. It is important to be clear about your experiences when developing your methodology too. This is referred to as researcher positionality. Maher and Tetreault (1993, p. 118) define positionality as:

Gender, race, class, and other aspects of our identities are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities. Knowledge is valid when it includes an acknowledgment of the knower’s specific position in any context, because changing contextual and relational factors are crucial for defining identities and our knowledge in any given situation.

By presenting your positionality in the research process, you are signifying the type of socially constructed, and other types of, knowledge you will be using to make sense of the data. As Maher and Tetreault explain, this increases the trustworthiness of your conclusions about the data. This would not be possible with a positivist ontology. We will discuss positionality more in chapter 6, but we wanted to connect it to the overall theoretical underpinnings of action research.

Advantages of Engaging in Action Research in the Classroom

In the following chapters, we will discuss how action research takes shape in your classroom, and we wanted to briefly summarize the key advantages to action research methodology over other types of research methodology. As Koshy (2010, p. 25) notes, action research provides useful methodology for school and classroom research because:

Advantages of Action Research for the Classroom

research can be set within a specific context or situation;
researchers can be participants – they don’t have to be distant and detached from the situation;
it involves continuous evaluation and modifications can be made easily as the project progresses;
there are opportunities for theory to emerge from the research rather than always follow a previously formulated theory;
the study can lead to open-ended outcomes;
through action research, a researcher can bring a story to life.

Action Research Copyright © by J. Spencer Clark; Suzanne Porath; Julie Thiele; and Morgan Jobe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Action Research

Action research can be defined as “an approach in which the action researcher and a client collaborate in the diagnosis of the problem and in the development of a solution based on the diagnosis” [1] . In other words, one of the main characteristic traits of action research relates to collaboration between researcher and member of organisation in order to solve organizational problems.

Action study assumes social world to be constantly changing, both, researcher and research being one part of that change. [2] Generally, action researches can be divided into three categories: positivist, interpretive and critical.

Positivist approach to action research , also known as ‘classical action research’ perceives research as a social experiment. Accordingly, action research is accepted as a method to test hypotheses in a real world environment.

Interpretive action research , also known as ‘contemporary action research’ perceives business reality as socially constructed and focuses on specifications of local and organisational factors when conducting the action research.

Critical action research is a specific type of action research that adopts critical approach towards business processes and aims for improvements.

The following features of action research need to be taken into account when considering its suitability for any given study:

It is applied in order to improve specific practices. Action research is based on action, evaluation and critical analysis of practices based on collected data in order to introduce improvements in relevant practices.
This type of research is facilitated by participation and collaboration of number of individuals with a common purpose
Such a research focuses on specific situations and their context

Advantages of Action Research

High level of practical relevance of the business research;
Can be used with quantitative, as well as, qualitative data;
Possibility to gain in-depth knowledge about the problem.

Disadvantages of Action Research

Difficulties in distinguishing between action and research and ensure the application of both;
Delays in completion of action research due to a wide range of reasons are not rare occurrences
Lack of repeatability and rigour

It is important to make a clear distinction between action research and consulting. Specifically, action research is greater than consulting in a way that action research includes both action and research, whereas business activities of consulting are limited action without the research.

Action Research Spiral

Action study is a participatory study consisting of spiral of following self-reflective cycles:

Planning in order to initiate change
Implementing the change (acting) and observing the process of implementation and consequences
Reflecting on processes of change and re-planning
Acting and observing

Kemmis and McTaggart’s (2000) Action Research Spiral

Kemmis and McTaggart (2000) do acknowledge that individual stages specified in Action Research Spiral model may overlap, and initial plan developed for the research may become obselete in short duration of time due to a range of factors.

The main advantage of Action Research Spiral model relates to the opportunity of analysing the phenomenon in a greater depth each time, consequently resulting in grater level of understanding of the problem.

Disadvantages of Action Research Spiral model include its assumption each process takes long time to be completed which may not always be the case.

My e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Dissertation in Business Studies: a step by step assistance offers practical assistance to complete a dissertation with minimum or no stress. The e-book covers all stages of writing a dissertation starting from the selection to the research area to submitting the completed version of the work within the deadline.

References

[1] Bryman, A. & Bell, E. (2011) “Business Research Methods” 3 rd edition, Oxford University Press

[2] Collis, J. & Hussey, R. (2003) “Business Research. A Practical Guide for Undergraduate and Graduate Students” 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan

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News and Events
Exploring the potential of action research in language education

Sign up for the webinar “Exploring the potential of action research in language education: Opportunities and challenges in local and global contexts”

Tuesday, 21 May 2024 17:00- 18:00 CET

Sign up for the webinar “Exploring the potential of action research in language education: Opportunities and challenges in local and global contexts”

Action research communities (ARC) ( .https://wwwecml.at/actionresearch ) webinar with Dr. Jane O’Toole (Teacher (Scoil Chrónáin Senior National School, Dublin https://www.stcronanssns.ie ) CARN Coordinating Group Member (Collaborative Action Research Network https://www.carn.org.uk ) Researcher ( https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jane-Otoole-3 ))

As a follow-up event to ARC Trainings and Consultancies, the ARC-Network is inviting you to participate in our interactive webinar which will explore the potential of action research in language education.

Why action research?
How does an action research methodology support language education both in terms of research and practice?
What are the opportunities and challenges that arise in conducting action research in the sphere of language education?
How might I go about integrating action research into my practice as a language educator?

These are just some of the questions to be unpacked as we examine both local and global contexts of language education. The webinar will be presented by Dr. Jane O'Toole, a practising schoolteacher in Ireland with a special interest in both language education and action research. The discussion will include insights into the Irish language context which will serve to illuminate the opportunities and challenges of action research in endangered language contexts in addition to inviting participants to share perspectives on their own local and global understandings of language education.

Target groups: The webinar which is moderated by the ARC team is open to everyone. It is likely to be of particular interest to participants in the Action research Communities’ Training and Consultancy workshops (and those registered for 2024 events) as well as to members of the CARN Network.

Webinar language: English

As only a limited number of places are available for the webinar, registration will be based on a first come, first served basis.

To register please sign up here

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Prevention Research Centers Collaborate with Rural Communities to Improve Health and Wellness

People living in rural areas have high rates of unhealthy behaviors like smoking and lack of physical activity, as well as less access to health care services and limited healthy foods options. These factors have been linked to high rates of heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and strokes among rural residents. 1

Working with rural communities to reduce these disparities presents unique challenges. Resources tend to be spread out, so people may have to travel a long way and they may not have good transportation. Less broadband access in some areas means that residents may have limited connectivity to learn about and access resources. PRCs have seen these health disparities in their own communities, and they are taking action.

Statistics about rural health. Half of adults living in rural areas do not meet the federal guidelines for aerobic or muscle strengthening physical activities in 2018. Nearly 11% of households in rural areas experience food insecurity. 15% of rural adults did not visit a health care provider in the previous year. Almost 23% of people in rural areas smoke cigarettes.

Addressing Rural Health Disparities

Many PRCs are working to expand access to health care, increase physical activity, decrease substance use, and address other health topics in rural America. In the 2019–2024 funding cycle, 10 PRCs are working to improve health in rural communities.

Colorado School of Public Health

Emory University

University of Iowa

University of Minnesota

Morehouse School of Medicine

University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

University of Washington

West Virginia University

Cornelius ME, Loretan CG, Wang TW, Jamal A, Homa DM. Tobacco product use among adults – United States, 2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2022;71(11):397-405. doi:10.15585/mmwr.mm7111a1
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Table 25. Participation in leisure-time aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities that meet the federal 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans among adults aged 18 and over, by selected characteristics: United States, selected years 1998–2018 [PDF]. Available at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2019/025-508.pdf [PDF – 158KB] . Accessed December 27, 2022.
Rural Health Information Hub. Rural Hunger and Access to Healthy Food. Available at https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/food-and-hunger . Accessed December 27, 2022.
National Center for Health Statistics. Percentage of having a doctor visit for any reason in the past 12 months for adults aged 18 and over, United States, 2019–2021. National Health Interview Survey. Generated interactively: May 16 2023 from https://wwwn.cdc.gov/NHISDataQueryTool/SHS_adult/index.html
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. BRFSS Prevalence & Trends Data. Available at https://nccd.cdc.gov/BRFSSPrevalence/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=DPH_BRFSS.ExploreByTopic&irbLocationType=StatesAndMMSA&islClass=CLASS14&islTopic=TOPIC09&islYear=2021&rdRnd=57824 . Accessed December 28, 2022.
Rural Health Information Hub. 2021 Minnesota Adolescent Sexual Health Report. Available at https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/resources/18103. Accessed December 27, 2022.
West Virginia Prevention Research Center. Substance Use. Available at https://prc.hsc.wvu.edu/projects/substance-use/. Accessed December 27, 2022.

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Systems Thinking in Action: Undergraduate Research Takes On Complex Problems

The projects presented at this year’s IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium , hosted by the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, explored alternative solutions to a wide range of problems: a team of Duke University students worked to improve audible safety alerts for freedivers; a Purdue University research group applied systems thinking to assess the performance of spaceports (the sites for launching or receiving spacecraft); and students from the UVA School of Data Science harnessed artificial intelligence as a method for detecting signs of human trafficking in state-level court cases.

One UVA team from the Department of Systems and Information Engineering sought to help neurodiverse members of the Charlottesville community gain meaningful employment.

Building Bridges

Through a local business called VIAble Ventures , the VIA Center for Neurodevelopment provides adults with intellectual and developmental disorders with jobs as artisans, making candles, bath salts, and sachets and selling them online and at Charlottesville farmer’s markets. For Sophie Kikuchi, a fourth-year student in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering , the service-minded business was a dream client for a systems engineering project. In research showcased at the symposium, Kikuchi and her teammates, advised by systems engineering professors Sara Riggs and Robert Riggs , applied systems thinking to help VIAble Ventures boost its sales and employ more adults with autism. Focusing on online sales, the group found ways to highlight top-selling products on the VIAble Ventures website and put the business’s unique mission front and center online.

“The mission of VIAble Ventures is just one that I've really grown to love,” Kikuchi said. “I feel like it's making an impact in the sense that, hopefully, getting the new website up will help increase the sales and employ more people with autism. The program does a lot of on-site job training and soft-skill teaching. It’s a great stepping stone for these individuals to be able to gain the experience they need to earn a paycheck.”

Kikuchi’s team presented one of the 100 papers featured this year at UVA’s design symposium, which has become one of the field’s leading student-focused forums for applied research, development and design over the past 20 years. Joining Kikuchi and her peers from UVA systems and information engineering at the conference were students from 32 higher education institutions in total, nine of which were international.

From Consulting to Co-design

Another student team from the Department of Systems and Information Engineering looked at ways to streamline operations for outpatient cancer infusion centers, which will need to meet the nation’s growing demand for cancer care.

Rupa Valdez , an associate professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering, advised the team as they closely examined the workings of an outpatient cancer infusion center in the Mid-Atlantic region. “It’s exciting to see students learn to integrate their quantitative skills with qualitative approaches to understanding system complexity,” Valdez said. “I also find it meaningful to watch students build trusting relationships with clients throughout the project, enabling us to move from a consulting to a co-design model.”

Kikuchi was able to experience that same shift to co-designing solutions with the client while working with VIAble Ventures. “It’s been really fun working with the people at VIA,” Kikuchi said. “They’ve been so responsive. They like to be very hands-on and give feedback on new website designs. They’re excited about it, too, which has made the experience even better on our end.”

For students, presenting projects at the Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium each year allows them not only to showcase their own work, but to see the vast array of subjects that systems engineers can explore, Kikuchi said. “It really shows how broadly you can apply the education you get through UVA systems engineering,” she said.

Explore Systems and Information Engineering

Many of the new technologies being introduced today hold the promise of substantial societal benefit if we successfully apply the technologies to solve real-world problems, such as treating and curing diseases and protecting critical systems from cyber attacks.

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COMMENTS

What Is Action Research?
Action research is a research method that aims to simultaneously investigate and solve an issue. In other words, as its name suggests, action research conducts research and takes action at the same time. ... As such, action research is different in purpose, context, and significance and is a good fit for those seeking to implement systemic ...
PDF What is Action Research?
Purposes of conducting action research In the context of this book, we can say that action research supports prac-titioners in seeking out ways in which they can provide an enhanced qual-ity of healthcare. With this purpose in mind, the following features of the action research approach are worthy of consideration (Koshy, 2010: 1):
Getting Started
The results of this type of research are practical, relevant, and can inform theory. Action research is different than other forms of research as there is less concern for universality of findings, and more value is placed on the relevance of the findings to the researcher and the local collaborators. Riel, M. (2020). Understanding action research.
Action research in business and management: A reflective review
The context within which action research is practised sets how an action research initiative is conceived, how it is designed and implemented, and what it contributes to theory and practice. We are working from a definition of action research originally advanced by Shani and Pasmore (2016/1985) and adapted by Coghlan and Shani (2014, p. 535 ...
What Is Action Research?
Action research. is a research method that aims to simultaneously investigate and solve an issue. In other words, as its name suggests, action research conducts research and takes action at the same time. ... As such, action research is different in purpose, context, and significance and is a good fit for those seeking to implement systemic ...
Action Research
As the name suggests, action research is an approach to research which aims at both taking action and creating knowledge or theory about that action as the action unfolds. It rejects the notion that research must be value free in order to be credible, in favor an explicitly socially engaged and democratic practice (Brydon-Miller et al. 2003 ).
Introduction: What Is Action Research?
This change aims to improve the research participants' concrete living conditions and possibly others in the same context. Action Research is fundamentally concerned with change. It is an inherently normative project. It tries to provide resources for the research participants to collaboratively change their situation toward a subjectively ...
Action research
Action research is an interactive inquiry process that balances problem-solving actions implemented in a collaborative context with data-driven collaborative analysis or research to understand underlying causes enabling future predictions about personal and organizational change.
Action Research and Systematic, Intentional Change in Teaching Practice
By tracing action research literature across four subject areas—English language arts (ELA), mathematics, science, and the social studies—it reflects contemporary emphasis on these subjects in the public school "core" curriculum and professional development literature (Brady, 2010) and provides a basis for comparative analysis.The results contribute to the scholarship of teaching ...
Action Research
Action Research (AR) is an ideal methodology to enable practical and emancipatory outcomes, as well as to generate relevant and authentic theory. Consequently, it has gained popularity worldwide. However, this emerging paradigm of AR in the Social Sciences has been widely misunderstood and misused by researchers, educators and practitioners. ...
Action Research
Maragaret Riel at the Center for Collaborative Action Research defines Action Research as "a systematic, reflective study of one's actions, and the effects of these actions, in a workplace or organizational context. As such, it involves a deep inquiry into one's professional practice. However, it is also a collaborative process as it is done WITH people in a social context, and understanding ...
Action Research
Alternatively known as practitioner research, self-study, action science, site-based inquiry, emancipatory praxis, etc., action research is essentially a collaborative, democratic, and participatory approach to systematic inquiry into a problem of practice within a local context. Action research has become prevalent in many fields and ...
Participatory action research
Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for ...
Action Research as a Process for Professional Learning and Leadership
The action researcher is primarily concerned with generating knowledge based on the actions within their own situated context. Action research findings are generalizable only within specific situations and within that specific educational context, which is described and considered as part of the research process. Sharing findings could be ...
How to Conduct Action Research?
Introduction. Action research stands as a unique approach in the realm of qualitative inquiry in social science research. Rooted in real-world problems, it seeks not just to understand but also to act, bringing about positive change in specific contexts. Often distinguished by its collaborative nature, the action research process goes beyond ...
What is Action Research?
Action research is a methodology that emphasizes collaboration between researchers and participants to identify problems, develop solutions and implement changes. Designers plan, act, observe and reflect, and aim to drive positive change in a specific context. Action research prioritizes practical solutions and improvement of practice, unlike ...
Action Research: What it is, Stages & Examples
Action research is a systematic approach researchers, educators, and practitioners use to identify and address problems or challenges within a specific context. It involves a cyclical process of planning, implementing, reflecting, and adjusting actions based on the data collected. Here are the general steps involved in conducting an action ...
(PDF) Four contexts of action research: Crossing boundaries for
Action research is the process by which practitioners (such as teachers and principals) attempt to study their problems in context in order to more accurately evaluate them and to make informed ...
Application of action research in the field of healthcare: a scoping
A comprehensive framework of the action research process is presented by Coghlan & Shani (2018) in terms of four factors. These four factors comprise a comprehensive framework as they capture the core of action research and the complex cause-and-effect dynamics within each factor and between the factors. 1. Context.
Action Research: A catalyst for comprehensive teaching and learning in
Action research can trace its roots to the 1940s, through the work of Kurt Lewin, a U.S. psychologist who is known as the founder of social psychology and who focused on action and applied research. His writings highlight how researchers and practitioners can come together to address classroom challenges. (For the purposes of this discussion ...
Action Research
Action research is a common journey for graduate students in education and other human science fields. This book attempts to meet the needs of graduate students, in-service teachers, and any other educators interested in action research and/or self-study. The chapters of this book draw on our collective experiences as educators in a variety of educational contexts, and our roles guiding ...
1 What is Action Research for Classroom Teachers?
It is a process to gather evidence to implement change in practices. Action research is participative and collaborative. It is undertaken by individuals with a common purpose. Action research is situation and context-based. Action research develops reflection practices based on the interpretations made by participants.
Action Research
Action research is based on action, evaluation and critical analysis of practices based on collected data in order to introduce improvements in relevant practices. This type of research is facilitated by participation and collaboration of number of individuals with a common purpose. Such a research focuses on specific situations and their context.
Action research
Action research is almost invariably eclectic in its use of specific data collection strategies. For example, research projects might incorporate a combination of such strategies as surveys (face-to-face, paper-pencil, and/or online), individual and small-group interviews (e.g. focus groups), in-depth case studies, observations of people's ...
Exploring the potential of action research in language education
The webinar will be presented by Dr. Jane O'Toole, a practising schoolteacher in Ireland with a special interest in both language education and action research. The discussion will include insights into the Irish language context which will serve to illuminate the opportunities and challenges of action research in endangered language contexts ...
Product development process for a new healthcare service in the
Product development process for a new healthcare service in the Industry 4.0 context: an action research approach. Miguel Núñez-Merino a Department of Business Organization, Marketing and Sociology ... Action Research has been used to identify the needs and orient the design and development of a technological platform that enables PM to be ...
Prevention Research Centers Support the Unique Needs of Youth as They
Resources tend to be spread out, so people may have to travel a long way and they may not have good transportation. Less broadband access in some areas means that residents may have limited connectivity to learn about and access resources. PRCs have seen these health disparities in their own communities, and they are taking action.
Systems Thinking in Action: Undergraduate Research Takes On Complex
The projects presented at this year's IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium, hosted by the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, explored alternative solutions to a wide range of problems: a team of Duke University students worked to improve audible safety alerts for freedivers; a Purdue University research group applied systems thinking to assess the ...
Research and Development Infrastructure Grant
Research 1: Very High Research Spending and Doctorate Production (R1) means that an institution has spent at least $50 million in total research and development (R&D) in a year, as reported to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey, and awarded at least 70 research/scholarship doctorates in ...
Nutrients
Introduction: Binge eating disorder (BED) is the most common eating disorder among those contributing to the development of obesity, and thus acts as a significant burden on the lives and health of patients. It is characterized by complex neurobiology, which includes changes in brain activity and neurotransmitter secretion. Existing treatments are moderately effective, and so the search for ...

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Introduction: What Is Action Research?

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Structured output methods and environmental issues: perspectives on co-created bottom-up and ‘sideways’ science

Four key principles

Aims of the Primer

Box 1 What does participatory action research do?

Experimentation

Building blocks for PAR research design

Building relationships

Box 2 Soft skills of a participatory action researcher

Establishing working practices

Establishing a common understanding of the issue

Observing, gathering and generating materials

Box 3 Case study of the BRIDGE Project: relationship building and collective art making as social change

Collaborative analysis

Planning and taking action

Applications

Reproducibility and data deposition

Limitations and optimizations

Institutional infrastructure

Co-option by powerful structures

Box 4 Case study: participatory power and its vulnerability

Power inequalities within PAR

Lack of control and unpredictability

Decolonizing or re-powering

Co-production

Global–local inequality and solidarity

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Future directions for patient engagement in research: a participatory workshop with Canadian patient partners and academic researchers

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