Action research

Action research practitioners reflect upon the consequences of their own questions, beliefs, assumptions, and practices with the goal of understanding, developing, and improving social practices. This action is designed to create three levels of change (1) self-change as the only subject of action research is the person who conducting the research. This person is seeking to be better understand the effects of their action in social settings and to engage in a process of living his or hers values. The second level is a collective process of understanding change in a classroom, office, community, organization or institution. Action research enlists others, and works to create a democratic sharing of voice to achieve deeper understanding of collective actions. It is a process of sharing finding with the community of researchers. This can be done in many ways, in journals, on websites, in books, in videos or at conferences. The Social Publishers Foundation provides support for this process. Action research involves actively participating in a change situation, often via an existing organization, whilst simultaneously conducting research. It can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices and knowledge of the environments within which they practice. As designers and stakeholders, researchers work with others to propose a new course of action to help their community improve its work practices. Depending upon the nature of the people involved in the action research as well as the person(s) organizing it, there are different ways of describing action research. There are also a set of approaches that share some properties with action research but have some different practices. These include: 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. After six decades of action research development, many methods have evolved that adjust the balance to focus more on the actions taken or more on the research that results from the reflective understanding of the actions. This tension exists between Action research challenges traditional social science by moving beyond reflective knowledge created by outside experts sampling variables, to an active moment-to-moment theorizing, data collecting and inquiry occurring in the midst of emergent structure. 'Knowledge is always gained through action and for action. From this starting point, to question the validity of social knowledge is to question, not how to develop a reflective science about action, but how to develop genuinely well-informed action – how to conduct an action science'. In this sense, engaging in action research is a form of problem-based investigation by practitioners into their practice, thus it is an empirical process. The goal is both to create and share knowledge in the social sciences. Online tutorials offered by the Center for Collaborative Action Research describe the process of engaging in action research from framing the inquiry question to sharing new knowledge with the community. Chris Argyris' action science begins with the study of how human beings design their actions in difficult situations. Humans design their actions to achieve intended consequences and are governed by a set of environment variables. How those governing variables are treated in designing actions are the key differences between single-loop and double-loop learning. When actions are designed to achieve the intended consequences and to suppress conflict about the governing variables, a single-loop learning cycle usually ensues.