Action Research

All You Need to Know

Jean McNiff

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526414274
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Social Science Research & Methodology

This book gives you all you need to know about action research, why you need to know it and how it can help you become a self-reflective practitioner-researcher. It provides the ideas and frameworks to understand action research, combined with a practical workbook to guide you through the practicalities and complexities of doing action research in your own context.

Inside you will find:

• An action plan to help you embark on your project
• Guidance and advice on learning to ask the right questions as you progress
• A full resource on writing up and communicating your results
• Inspiration to explain the significance of what you have achieved, so that other people can learn with and from you.

Accessible and insightful, this is the complete start to finish guide to doing influential action research. It is the ideal companion for students and researcher-practitioners in any research setting, from education and health to business.

Part I What Do I Need to Know?

This part is about the main contemporary issues in action research. It explains that action research is about practitioners creating new ideas about improving their work and putting those ideas forward as their personal theories of practice. This is different from traditionalist research in which official researchers produce theory, which they then expect practitioners to apply to their practices. Given the power-constituted nature of these issues, we are therefore immediately into issues of power and politics, about what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower.

Part I discusses these ideas. It contains the following chapters.

• Chapter 1 What is action research?
• Chapter 2 Who can do action research?
• Chapter 3 The values base of action research
• Chapter 4 Critical times for action research

I suggested in the Introduction that you could regard working with the book as your action enquiry into how you can learn about action research and how to do it. At this point in your action–reflection cycle you are asking, ‘What is my concern?’ You are saying that you need to find out what the main ideas of action research are so that you have a good grasp of the basics in order to begin your action research from an informed position.

1 What is Action Research?

The action research family is wide and diverse, and different people hold different perspectives about what action research is, what it is for, who can do it and how. You need to know about these debates so that you can decide for yourself which approach to take and then get actively involved. Taking part also helps you appreciate why you should do action research and how this can help you contribute actively to shaping the future for yourself, for others and for the world.

This chapter is organised into four sections that deal with these issues:

1. What action research is and is not
2. Different approaches to action research
3. Purposes of action research
4. When and when not to use action research

1. What Action Research is and is Not

Action research is a practical form of enquiry that enables anyone in every job and walk of life to investigate and evaluate their work. They ask, ‘What am I doing? Do I need to improve anything? If so, what? How do I improve it? Why should I improve it?’ They produce their accounts of practice to show: (1) how they are trying to improve what they are doing; this involves first thinking about and learning how to do it better; (2) how this enables them to give meaning to their lives; and (3) how they are trying to influence others to do the same thing. These accounts stand as their own practical theories of practice, from which others can learn if they wish.

From this perspective, action research has become increasingly popular around the world as a way for all people to take action in their personal and social situations with a view to improving them. It has also become popular as a form of professional learning across the professions and disciplines, including in business and management (Coghlan and Shani, 2016) and leadership studies (Branson et al., 2016; Davids and Waghid, 2017). It is particularly well developed in education, specifically in teaching, and in professional education, mainly in teacher education (Ellis and McNicholl, 2015) and nurse education (McDonnell and McNiff, 2016). A major attraction of action research is that everyone can do it, so it is for ‘ordinary’ practitioners as well as for principals, managers and administrators. It is not a case that only professional researchers can do action research: students and plumbers also can and should do action research (McNiff, 2016a). You can gain university accreditation for your action enquiries, as some of the case studies in this book show. In a practice setting, action research can therefore be a powerfully liberating form of professional enquiry because it means that practitioners themselves investigate their practices as they find ways to live more fully in the direction of their personal and social values. They are not told what to do; they decide for themselves what to do, in negotiation with others. This can work in relation to individual as well as collective enquiries. More and more groups of practitioners are getting together to investigate their collective work and put their stories of learning into the public domain. Your story can add to these and expand and strengthen them.

This is what makes action research distinctive. Practitioners research their own practices, which is different from most traditionalist forms of research where a professional researcher does research on rather than with practitioners. Traditionalist researchers tend to stand outside a situation and ask, ‘What are those people over there doing? How do we understand and explain what they are doing?’ This kind of research is often called outsider or spectator research: the kind of theory they generate is usually abstract and conceptual and is communicated through words. Action researchers, however, are insider researchers. They see themselves as part of the context they are investigating, and ask, individually and collectively, ‘Is my/our work going as we wish? How do we improve it where necessary?’ If they feel their work is already reasonably satisfactory, they evaluate it and produce evidence to show why they believe this to be the case. If they feel something needs improving, they work on that aspect, keeping records and producing regular oral and written progress reports about what they are doing. The kind of theory they produce is dynamic and developmental and communicated through their actions as well as their words.

Many varieties of action research are available these days and most are counted as legitimate within their own traditions, so researchers adopt different positionalities in relation with others in the research field (see page 14 of this book, which presents a summary of these positionalities). Remember, however, that regardless of the approach you choose, you will need to justify your stance and explain why you have chosen it.

Here are some examples of traditionalist research (outsider) questions and action research (insider) questions to show the difference between them.

Traditionalist Research (Outsider) Questions

• What is the relationship between nurses’ practice-based knowledge and the quality of patient care?
• Does management style influence worker productivity?
• Will a different seating arrangement increase audience participation?

Action Research (Insider) Questions

• How do I study my nursing practice for the benefit of the patients?
• How do I improve my management style to encourage productivity?
• How do I encourage greater audience participation through trying out different seating arrangements?

Notional Action Plans

Like all research, action research aims to be a disciplined, systematic process which at some point you make public (even if this is only handing in an assignment to your supervisor). As in all research it follows a notional action plan. Here are some of those action plans that show the process of everyday enquiry: they are notional in that you should see them as heuristics, ways of understanding a topic that you intend to investigate further.

A notional action plan can take this form:

• Take stock of what is going on.
• Identify a concern.
• Think of a possible way forward.
• Try it out.
• Monitor the action by gathering data to show what is happening.
• Evaluate progress by establishing procedures for making judgements about what is happening.
• Test the validity of claims to knowledge.
• Modify practice in light of the evaluation.

This action plan can then be turned into a set of questions that you can elaborate on as appropriate to your context, as follows:

• What is my concern? What issue do I wish to investigate?
• Why am I concerned? Why is this an issue? Why do I wish to investigate it?
• What is my research question? Have I several questions relating to different aspects of my research?
• How do I show the situation as it is and as it develops? What kind of data do I need to gather to show what is going on?
• What can I do about it? What will I do about it? What actions will I take?
• How do I evaluate what I am doing? How do I analyse and interpret my data to generate evidence?
• How do I test the validity of my claims to knowledge? How do I show that people can believe what I say?
• How do I check that any conclusions I come to are reasonably fair and accurate? How do I avoid jumping to conclusions?
• How do I write a good quality report? How do I disseminate my findings so that other people can learn from and with me?
• How do I modify my ideas and practices in light of the evaluation? How will I use the learning I have acquired from doing my research to inform new practices? (See also McNiff, 2016b.)

In practical terms, this means you would identify a particular concern, try out a new way of doing things, gather, analyse and interpret the data on an ongoing basis, reflect on what was happening, check out any new understandings with others, and in light of your reflections try a different way that may or may not be more successful. As a nurse, for example, you would monitor and evaluate how you were relating to patients, and how they were responding to you (Higgs and Titchen, 2001; McDonnell, 2017; Rolfe, 1998). This would help you find the best way of working with patients to encourage their self-motivation towards recovery.

The process of ‘observe – reflect – act – evaluate – modify – move in new directions’ is generally known as action–reflection, although no single term is used in the literature. Because the process tends to be cyclical, it is often referred to as an action–reflection cycle (see Figure 1.1). The process is ongoing because as soon as you reach a provisional point where you feel things are satisfactory, that point itself raises new questions and it is time to begin again. Good visual models exist in the literature to communicate this process (Elliott, 1991; McNiff, 2013).

Figure 1.1 A typical action–reflection cycle

Here are some examples of action enquiries undertaken by real people:

• Colleen McLaughlin and Nazipa Ayubayeva (2015) developed an action research project into how they could support educational reform in Kazakhstan.
• Andrew Townsend and Pat Thomson (2015) worked with a collaborative team comprising staff from a water heritage museum, a university, teachers and artists: the aim was to improve educational practices through the use of art installations.
• Anbarah Al-Abdallah (2013), working in Qatar, wanted to help her learners develop greater proficiency in maths.
• Mzuzile Mpondwana (2008) wanted to find ways of developing better relationships among people living and working in a South African township.
• Susanne Winther (2016) from Denmark wanted to support a smoother transition from intensive care units to general wards.
• Each asked questions of the kind, ‘How do I do this? How do I learn to do it better?’

2. Different Approaches to Action Research

The action research family has been around for a long time, at least since the 1920s, and has become increasingly influential. As often happens, however, different family members have developed different opinions and interests, some have developed their own terminology, and some have formed breakaway groups, some of which have in turn become mainstreamed. You need to decide which kind of action research is best for you, which means developing at least a working knowledge of the field and taking a critical perspective to some key issues. These include the following:

• Different views of what action research is about and which perspective to take.
• Different forms of action research and different names and terminology.

Different Views of What Action Research is about and Which Perspective to Take

There is general agreement among the action research community that action research is about:

• action: taking action to improve practices, which is rooted in improving understanding; and …
• research: finding things out and coming to new understandings, that is, creating new knowledge. In action research the knowledge is about how and why you should act in the world and to evaluate the effects of your actions.

There is disagreement about:

• the balance between taking action and doing research: many texts emphasise the need to take action but not to do research, and this turns action research into a form of personal-professional development but without a solid research/knowledge base that clarifies the reasons and purposes for the action;
• who does the action and who does the research, that is, who creates the knowledge about what is done and whether it has achieved its goals.

Furthermore, because knowledge contributes to theory, that is, explanations for how and why things happen, it becomes a question of who does the action and who generates the theory (explanations) about the action. To help clarify, take the example of a video shoot.

On most video shoots, some people are positioned, and frequently position themselves, as actors and agents (doers), while others see themselves as directors and producers (thinkers). Similarly, practitioners in workplaces are often seen as actors whose job is to do things, while ‘official’ researchers in research institutions such as universities are ...