Quality

Multiple Dimensions of Quality

Action research, although not easily defined, is described as a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowledge in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury describe it as bringing together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people and, more generally, the flourishing of individual persons and their communities. Action research therefore seeks to interweave what is often kept separate, thereby honouring unity and diversity, leading to a multidimensional terrain of endeavour.

Timely action with people in social systems at this moment in history means a willingness to engage with unprecedented challenges of sustainability that are interrelated and compounding. Challenges include complex issues such as poverty and injustice, patriarchy, climate change, the degradation of nature, globalization, inequalities and fundamentalisms of all types. Conventional science and its conduct are part of these problems. Far from being the enterprise of a lone researcher, action research engages local stakeholders—particularly those traditionally excluded from the research process—in problem definition, research processes, interpretation of results, design for action and evaluation of outcomes.

There has always been tension with regard to how objectivist we ought to be in the development of knowledge. Kurt Lewin, often considered the founding father of action research, exemplified a hypothesis-testing approach. John Collier, Lewin’s colleague, who actually coined the term action research, advocated a more democratic collaboration in the treatment of important social issues. Contemporary action research continues to hold this tension. Yet in the light of serious efforts to integrate the insights since the post-Lewinian linguistic and pragmatic turns—insights largely ignored by conventional social science—Collier’s original vision appears to be in the foreground today.

Beyond the Cartesian Split to Integrating Linguistic and Action Turns

Orlando Fals Borda has claimed that action research is the most natural form of inquiry known. Dawn Chandler and William Torbert go as far as to assert that it is ubiquitous, especially in its embrace of future considerations as a part of inquiry, rather than documenting only what has safely passed. Indeed, for most of history, most people in most parts of the world have been practical and time sensitive in their efforts towards knowledge generation. That is, until the great Cartesian split—the split between reason and intuition, mind and body—that resulted from the implications of a world view that primarily and solely privileged a search for objectivity. The resulting conventional knowledge is therefore evaluated according to internal and external validity, reliability and its generalizability. Bjørn Gustavsen has quipped that conventional research is concerned only with being ‘very right’. In most social science studies, this ‘rightness’ is garnered by focusing on as narrow a segment of reality as possible, with the cost of discounting most of lived reality. The circumscribed concerns of validity are simply unsuitable to the broader aims of action research, which include helpfulness to its stakeholders, insight for practice at the personal, group and larger systems levels as well as social transformation.

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