Action Research

Jean McNiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136283741
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Since its first publication, Action Research: Principles and Practice has become a key text in its field. This new updated edition clearly describes and explains the practices of action research and its underlying values, and introduces important new ideas, including:

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• all professionals should be reflective practitioners;

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• they should produce their personal theories of practice to show how they are holding themselves accountable for their educational influences in learning;

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• the stories they produce become a new people's history of action research, with potential for influencing new futures.

This new edition has expanded in scope, to contribute to diverse fields including professional development across the sectors and the disciplines. It considers the current field, including its problems as well as its considerable hopes and prospects for new thinking and practices. Now fully updated, this book contains:

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• A wealth of case-study material

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• New chapters on the educational significance of action research

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• An overview of methodological and ethical discussion

The book is a valuable addition to the literature on research methods in education and nursing and healthcare, and professional education, and contributes to contemporary debates about the generation and dissemination of knowledge and its potential influence for wider social and environmental contexts.

Practitioners across the professions who are planning action research in their own work settings will find this book a helpful introduction to the subject while those studying on higher degree courses will find it an indispensable resource.

Part I What do we know? The principles of action research

This Part introduces ideas relevant to action research and the field of educational research in general. It gives an outline of the main philosophical traditions that inform the field, and contains the following:

Chapter 1: ‘What do we know? The principles of action research’. This chapter outlines some of the core principles of action research, and some of the implications they may have for everyday practices.

Chapter 2: ‘How do we come to know? Linking theory and practice’. This chapter deals with issues about how knowledge is created and its relationship with practice. It deals with interrelationships between different typologies in the literatures, specifically those to do with knowledge, human interests and methodologies.

Chapter 3: ‘Who has influenced our thinking? Key theorists in action research’. Here we consider some key theorists in the field of action research, and possible new directions for the field.

Chapter 4: ‘What do we need to know? Exercising educational influence’. The chapter focuses on issues of educational influence, and how this may be exercised for specific purposes.

You can of course do action research without knowing these foundational issues. However, they may help your thinking by providing theoretical and conceptual frameworks. They are essential if you are doing action research study for accreditation.

In Part II we consider how these ideas may be put to use in a practical way.

1 What do we know? The principles of action research

DOI: 10.4324/9780203112755-1

Action research is a name given to a particular way of looking at your practice to check whether it is as you feel it should be. You may be checking it as part of your critical reflection on your practice, or perhaps in response to a professional development review. If you feel that your practice is satisfactory, you will be able to explain how and why you believe this to be the case, and produce authenticated evidence to ground your claims that you are doing well. If you feel your practice needs attention in some way, you will be able to take action to improve it, and produce evidence to show how the practice has improved. You can show the relationship between your learning and your actions in the world: you explain how you have learnt to improve your practice.

Because action research is done by you, the practitioner, it is often referred to as practitioner research, or practice-led or practice-based research. It is a form of on-the-job research, undertaken by people in any context, regardless of their status, position, age or previous experience. It involves you thinking carefully about what you are doing, so it becomes critical self-reflective practice.

Critical self-reflection is central. In some social science forms of research, researchers tend to do research on other people. They observe other people and ask, ‘How do I describe and explain what they are doing?’ In many forms of action research, action researchers prefer to do research on themselves, in company with other people who are doing the same. They observe themselves and ask, ‘How do I/we describe and explain what I am/we are doing?’ No distinction is made between researchers and practitioners (although some people who wish to maintain their status as a ‘professional’ researcher like to keep the distinction). Traditionalist social science researchers tend to enquire into other people's lives and use them as data to demonstrate the validity of the researcher's theories (and, to be fair, some action researchers also do this). Generally speaking, action researchers prefer to enquire into their own lives, and speak with other people as colleagues. Action research therefore becomes an enquiry by the self into the self, with others acting as co-researchers and critical learning partners. Therefore, although you think for yourself and explain how you hold yourself personally accountable for what you are doing, you recognise that you are always in relation with other people, always situated in a real-life social, political, economic and historical context.

Action research involves learning in and through action and reflection, and is conducted in a variety of contexts. Today, you can do action research in the social and caring sciences; in education, nursing and health care; in artistic and creative practices; in organisational, management and business studies; and in virtually any other discipline or area. You can find action research programmes on workplace professional education courses and higher degree studies, as well as in international relations, peace studies and disaster management programmes. Recommendations are made everywhere for learning programmes and professional continuing education courses to use an action research approach.

The case studies in this book show some of this variety and range. Because action research is always to do with improving learning, and improving learning is always to do with education and personal and professional growth, many people regard action research as a powerful form of educational research. This means that learning across all disciplines needs to be seen as a form of educational research: it is as important to be aware of the process of learning as much as the process of developing subject knowledge.

However, it important to remember that there is no such ‘thing’ as ‘action research’. It is a form of words that refers to people becoming aware of and making public their processes of learning with others, and explaining how this informs their practices. Furthermore, no one can learn on behalf of anyone else; we all have to learn for ourselves. Often, however, people write about action research as if it were a ‘thing’, a self-contained area to be studied, separate from themselves. I am doing this right now, in that I am speaking about an object called ‘action research’ but not doing anything other than talk about it. Many people speak like this all the time, as if action research were something abstract, a set of procedures to be applied to practice, rather than a living experience. This perspective tends to distort the underpinning values of action researchers such as autonomy, independent thinking and accountability. So when we speak and write about action research, it is important to remember that we are speaking about the real-life experiences of real-life people. The meaning of action research is in the way people learn to negotiate ways of living together and explaining how they do so, emphasising the problematics as much as the successes.

Yet while there might be no such thing as action research, there are people who are action researchers. They might not always call themselves by that name, but if they wished to give their work a theoretical framework, or some underpinning organising principles, they could well call these ‘action research’. When people first encounter the idea of action research, they often say, ‘This is what I do in any case’, and to a certain extent they are right (see Part II, about what else needs to be done to turn practice into research). The idea of action research refers to the theoretical framework and organising principles that guide practice, as well as its procedures, which is why it comes under the broad heading of ‘practice-based research’. Action research is not a thing in itself; the term always implies a process of people interacting together and learning with and from one another in order to understand their practices and situations, and to take purposeful action to improve them.

Action researchers share certain sets of beliefs, commitments and hopes. What they do (action research) is a set of practices that demonstrates those beliefs, commitments and hopes in practice. They undertake research to help them learn how to exercise their individual and collective educational agency, which they use to contribute to improved human, non-human and environmental wellbeing. Lawrence Stenhouse wrote in 1983 that ‘research is systematic enquiry made public’. I added in 2002 (McNiff 2002) ‘with social intent’, and I am now expanding this to ‘with social and environmental intent’. I see the task of social formations as contributing to the wellbeing of all forms of life.

Questions therefore arise about what action researchers do, and how and why they do it. These are questions to do with how we view ourselves (ontology), how we come to know (epistemology), how we do things (methodology) and what we hope to achieve (socio-political intent). These aspects are always interrelated and mutually reciprocal, as now explained.

Aspects of research

Action research (and, for that matter, all kinds of research) is more than just doing activities. Remember that the term ‘action research’ contains two words: ‘action’ and ‘research’.

• The ‘action’ of action research refers to what you do.
• The ‘research’ of action research refers to how you find out about what you do.

The action part of action research involves you thinking carefully about the circumstances you are in, how you got here and why the situation is as it is, i.e. your social, political and historical contexts. It also involves you thinking carefully about whether your perceptions of the situation are accurate, or whether perhaps you need to revise them in light of what you have discovered about the current situation. As a nurse, how can you be reasonably confident that you are giving the best care to patients? What might they or other people say if you asked them? This is where the research part comes in.

The research part of action research involves data-gathering, reflection on the action shown through the data, generating evidence from the data, and making claims to knowledge based on conclusions drawn from authenticated evidence. When you produce your report, it is not enough only to offer descriptions of activities, i.e. to say what you are doing. You also need to give explanations for the activities, that is, to say why you are doing it (your reasons) and what you hope to achieve (your purposes). Reasons and purposes are grounded in values. If you claim that you have helped others become more confident through initiating self-help groups, the values that inform your work would include the idea that people should feel respected and speak for themselves. When people demonstrate their confidence, such as asking a question in public, you could claim that you had helped them and perhaps fulfilled your values. You are not saying that you caused this to happen; you are saying that you were in there somewhere and, even perhaps in small part, influenced their learning.

Case study: Ingunn Skjesol Bulling, Norway

An abiding research interest is what makes us able to learn and change, and how I can help others do this in ways that are right for them. This interest informs my work with health-care workers who support children who need help in handling their daily lives, and with professional colleagues. We work together in writing and creating theories that have implications for the people we work with and for ourselves. For me, an interesting aspect of doing action research is that the understandings that emerge through the process can often be quite different from the expectations you had in the beginning. But I continue to try.

This idea of showing how you are trying to live your values in your practice is at the heart of debates about demonstrating and judging quality and validity in action research. It includes issues relating to:

• identifying and articulating your values, i.e. what gives meaning to your life and practices;
• whether you really are living and practising in the direction of your values, and how you test the validity of what you are saying when you claim that you are;
• how you justify those values as they emerge in your practice; this involves interrogating your values and seeing whether they are the right ones for you and your situation; as well as whether your values are shared by others in, say, culturally diverse settings;
• how you judge quality of practice and research in relation to whether you have helped yourself and other people to come to think for yourselves and develop critical perspectives on what you are doing and saying.

If you wish to engage fully with these issues it is helpful to know some key terms, as follows:

• Ontology – the way we view ourselves, a theory of being. You ask, ‘Who do I think I am?’ How you think about yourself influences how you see other people, and how you position yourself in the research.
• Epistemology – a theory of knowledge (what is known), including a theory of knowledge acquisition and creation (how it comes to be known). You ask, ‘What do I know and how do I come to know it?’ The idea of what you know and how you come to know it includes ideas about logic, i.e. how you think. Some people think in linear and analytical ways, while others think in dialogical and relational ways. There are many kinds of logic or ways of thinking, contrary to the dominant idea that there is only one kind, which is rational and one-dimensional.
• Methodology – how we do things: do we see action research as the application of a fixed set of steps, or perhaps as a journey where we find things out as we go?
• Socio-political intent – purposeful action is always intentional; your research needs to be understood in relation to what you intend to do and how you intend to do it. A main aim of action research is to generate knowledge that can lead to improved understanding and experience for social and environmental benefit. For example, Howard Zinn (2005b) says that educators need to get involved with real-life issues, otherwise they may position themselves as intellectuals without getting involved in the real world.

These issues have implications for action researchers, because key questions arise:

• What do action researchers believe in? – ontological issues
• How do action researchers come to know? – epistemological issues (which includes how they think, and their forms of logic)
• How do action researchers act? – methodological issues
• What are the implications of our knowledge for socio-political and environmental issues?
• How do action researchers use their knowledge for social and environmental wellbeing?

The chapter engages primarily with the first three issues. Matters regarding socio-political and environmental implications are dealt with in Chapters 11 and 12.

What do action researchers believe in? – ontological issues

Action researchers believe that all people are equal and should enjoy...