Action Research

I had the pleasure of meeting several action researchers across the USA during my sabbatical late last year. The multiple purposes for my visit to the USA were to meet doctoral students doing their research in organizational change and development in Hawaii; interview prominent action researchers in the US about examining action research dissertations; and to have discussions with action researchers on ways to increase conversations among action researchers around the world. I thought it would be good to share some insights from my visit with fellow action researchers as a letter to Action Research.

This article provides a detailed description of the in-field experience of using community mapping as a participatory action research tool with youth. It describes a case study, the Youth Friendly Health Services project (YFHS project), in which a team of Vancouver youth carried out a participatory evaluation of health clinics by mapping out criteria for evaluation and then creating an evaluation tool based on the maps that were created. Community mapping proved to be an inclusive and appropriate tool to engage youth perspectives. The major challenges faced in the process were in determining how to represent and act upon the findings of the mapping process. Their experience suggests that while such innovative data collection tools such as community mapping can successfully engage youth, not just as participants, but as facilitators of research, they must be accompanied by equally creative and innovative approaches to formulating research results and outcomes.

Participative action research can appear both strange and familiar in the People’s Republic of China. China has a distinctive intellectual history, a specifically Chinese approach to citizen participation, and a growing interest in international forms of action research. For more than 30 years, participative approaches have been used in rural and community health in China, although these activities usually lack explicit reflective learning. Much of Chinese education follows authoritarian Confucian traditions. Transformation of Chinese education through action research is recently receiving official recognition as it is expected to develop creativity based on reflective thinking. There is also evidence that action research is bringing organizational and professional development to Chinese public administration, and enhancing rural health. While China has established a few centres of action research education cooperation from the West, it is inevitable that Chinese forms of action research will develop. The challenge for the international community of action researchers is to build open communication with Chinese action researchers to help the development of a Chinese way of conducting action research.

An organizational diagnosis provides analysts with information on which to base and plan an appropriate intervention to improve an organization’s functioning. In many instances, the data collected are from a sample of an organization’s population. However, the information collected must be considered representative of the whole organization. In this article, we discuss the importance of response rate in organizational surveys and non-response bias in achieving the necessary representativeness. We describe an action research project in which we involved members of a high-tech organization. Our data were collected through interviews and an anonymous web survey representing 42 percent of the organization’s population. We describe how we employed action groups to determine the content representativeness of our data. This step was deemed necessary before initiating the action planning step. We propose a guideline for action researchers to apply during organizational diagnoses requiring respondent anonymity.

The paper offers a first-person experiential observational study by a newcomer to the use of research initiatives to combat poverty in two geographic regions and Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Drawing on participatory action research and the tradition of ‘the animateur’ (catalyst-facilitation), the work of the sponsoring local agency, Research Initiatives Bangladesh (RIB) is described as illuminating a range of quite powerful applications. The paper is part of a larger project to bring to a western audience knowledge of the use of these methodologies in the Indo-Asian region, and some comparative reflections on them.