Action Research

The main features of action research are as follows:

• It includes a developmental aim that embodies a professional ideal and that all those who participate are committed to realizing in practice.
• It focuses on changing practice to make it more consistent with the developmental aim.
• In identifying and explaining inconsistencies between aspiration and practice (such explanation may lie in the broader institutional, social, and political context), it problematizes the assumptions and beliefs (theories) that tacitly underpin professional practice.
• It involves professional practitioners in a process of generating and testing new forms of action for realizing their aspirations and thereby enables them to reconstruct the theories that guide their practice.
• It is a developmental process characterized by reflexivity on the part of the practitioner.

From an action research perspective, professional practice is a form of research and vice versa.

Good action research is informed by the values practitioners want to realize in their practice. In social work, for example, it is defined by the professional values (e.g., client empowerment, antioppressive practice) social workers want to realize. Professional values are ideas about what constitutes a professionally worthwhile process of working with clients and colleagues. Such values specify criteria for identifying appropriate modes of interaction. In other words, they define the relationship between the content of professional work, practitioners, and their various clients.

Terms such as care, education, empowerment, autonomy, independence, quality, justice, and effectiveness all specify qualities of that relationship. Good action research is developmental; namely, it is a form of reflective inquiry that enables practitioners to better realize such qualities in their practice. The tests for good action research are very pragmatic ones. Will the research improve the professional quality of the transactions between practitioners and clients or colleagues? Good action research might fail this particular test if it generates evidence to explain why improvement is impossible under the circumstances, in which case it justifies a temporary tolerance of the status quo. In each case, action research provides a basis for wise and intelligent decision making. A decision to wait awhile with patience until the time is ripe and circumstances open new windows of opportunity is sometimes wiser than repeated attempts to initiate change.

These are not extrinsic tests but ones that are continuously conducted by practitioners within the process of the research itself. If practitioners have no idea whether their research is improving their practice, then its status as action research is very dubious indeed. It follows from this that action research is not a different process from that of professional practice. Rather, action research is a form of practice and vice versa. It fuses practice and research into a single activity. Those who claim they have no time for research because they are too busy working with clients and colleagues misunderstand the relationship. They are saying they have no time to change their practice in any fundamental sense. When practice strategies are viewed as hypothetical probes into ways of actualizing professional values, they constitute the core activities of a research process, a process that must always be distinguished from research on practice by outsiders.

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