Participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere (paper)

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research

Participatory research

Three particular are often used to distinguish participatory research from conventional research: shared ownership of research projects, community-based analysis of social problems, and an orientation toward community action. (p. 560)

Critical action research

Critical action research expresses a commitment to bring together broad social analysis - the self-reflexive collective self-study of practice, the way in which language is used, organization and power in a local situation, and action to improve things. (p. 560)

Classroom action research

Classroom action research typically involves the use of inquiry and data collection by teachers (often with the help from academics) with a view to teachers making judgments about how to improve their own practices... ...Primacy is given to teachers' self-understandings and judgements. The emphasis is "practical," that is, on the interpretations that the teachers and students are making and acting on in the situation. (p. 561)

Action learning

The fundamental idea of action learning is to bring people together to learn from each other's experiences. There is emphasis on studying one's own situation, clarifying what the organization is trying to achieve, working to remove obstacles. Key aspirations are organizational efficacy and efficiency, although advocates of action learning affirm the moral purpose and content of their own work and of the managers they seek to engage in the process. (p. 561)

Action science

Action science emphases the study of practice in organizational settings as a source of new understandings and improved practice. The field of action science systematically builds the relationship between academic organizational psychology and practical problems as the are experienced in organizations. It identifies two aspects of professional knowledge: (a) the formal knowledge that all competent members of the profession are thought to share and into which professionals are inducted into the group and (b) the professional knowledge of interpretation and enactment. A distinction is also made between the professional's "espoused theory" and "theories in use," and "gaps" between these are used as points of change. (p. 561)

Critical participatory action research

Although the process of participatory action research is only poorly described in terms of a mechanical sequence of steps, it is generally thought to involve a spiral of self-reflective cycles of the following:

• Planning a change
• Acting and observing the process and consequences
• Reflecting on these processes and consequences
• Replanning
  
• Acting and observing again
• Reflecting again, and so on...

...In reality, the process might not be as neat as this spiral of self-contained cycles of planning suggests... ...the process is likely to be more fluid, open, and responsive. (p. 563)

...participatory action research has seven other key features that are at least as important as the self-reflective spiral.

1. Participatory action research is a social process. Participatory action research deliberately explores the relationship between the realms of the individual and the social...
2. Participatory action research is participatory. Participatory action research engages people in examining their knowledge (understandings, skills, and values) and interpretive categories (the ways in which they interpret themselves and their action in the social and material world)...
3. Participatory action research is practical and collaborative. Participatory action research engages people in examining the social practices that link them with others in social interaction...
4. Participatory action research is emancipatory. Participatory action research aims to help people recover, release themselves from, the constraints of irrational, unproductive, unjust, and unsatisfying social structures that limit their self-development and self determination...
5. Participatory social research is critical. Participatory action research aims to help people recover, and release themselves from, the constraints embedded in the social media through which they interact - their language (discourses), their modes of work, and the social relationships of power (in which the experience affiliation and difference, inclusion and exclusion - relationships in which, grammatically speaking, they interact with others in the third, second, or first person...
6. Participatory action research is reflexive (e.g., recursive, dialectical). Participatory action research aims to help people to investigate reality in order to change it... ...it is a deliberative through which people aim to transform their practices through a spiral of cycles of critical and self-critical action and reflection...
7. Participatory action research aims to transform both theory and practice. Participatory action research does not regard either theory or practice as preeminent in the relationship between theory and practice; rather it aims to articulate and develop each in relation to the other through critical reasoning about both theory and practice. (pp. 566-8)

Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. (2005) Participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.