Cycles of Action and Reflection

A Starting Definition

Action research is a term used to describe a family of related investigative approaches that integrate theory and action, with the goal of addressing important organizational, community and social issues together with those who experience them. Many researchers consider this approach to investigation to have been instigated by the theorist and social psychologist Kurt Lewin.

Action research is one of many investigative approaches developed in response to what were perceived to be problems with scientific method—the once dominant investigative approach. Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln have summarized these problems in their argument for naturalistic inquiry over the rationalistic model of inquiry. They address issues of truth, reality, the relationship between the inquirer and those under inquiry, causal relationship within the inquiry and the values that underpin the inquiry process, and they particularly focus on the nature of research when it involves people. Action research and other alternative forms of investigation evolved from the articulation of a belief system that embraced multiple truths and saw knowledge as arising from sources such as practice and experience. These discussions about what constitutes appropriate research with people have prompted some researchers to describe their investigative approach by using the term inquiry rather than research to emphasize the relationship between their method and alternative paradigms.

There are varying definitions for action inquiry. These represent both the different pathways by which investigators have come to this approach and the different ways in which aspects of this approach are valued. These different approaches are explored in some of the models that follow. Given that action inquiry often aligns with an ontological belief in multiple truths, it fits with the idea that there are also multiple definitions for this approach. While there may be a multiplicity of definitions, they are all related in a common approach. This approach involves iterations or cycles of problem identification, action planning, implementation, evaluation and reflection.

This section focuses on these types of iteration or cycles of action and inquiry.

Models Representing Action Research

Kurt Lewin proposed a cycle of steps in his articulation of action inquiry:

• 1.
  Identify a general or initial idea.
• 2.
  Find out the facts about that idea (reconnaissance).
• 3.
  Plan and take a first step of action.
• 4.
  Evaluate the impact of the first step.
• 5.
  Amend the plan, and lead into a second and subsequent set of steps.

This general plan of a process of investigation has been adopted into models which represent it cyclically by people like Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart (see Figure 1), who described the iteration as cycles of planning, acting and observing and reflecting. They emphasized the movement towards a change in the situation about which the investigator is reflecting and acting and how one cycle informs its successive cycles.

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