Action research: a breakthrough to professional development for all

Shiori Kishi
Jul 20, 2017 · 4 min read

The concept and methods of action research can be applied to all kinds of profession

Over the past decades, action research has gained grounds in professional fields such as teaching, nursing and psychology. Action research is a type of research that focuses on improving and developing the action of those who are involved. It is a systematic process of inquiry carried out by, and for, the actors themselves. It is often utilised when the actors wish to improve what they have been doing, or the way they address issues or problems.

As a teaching intern working in a primary school, I had a chance to be involved in an educational action research project conducted by a group of primary educators. This experience led me to conclude that action research can be, and should be, utilised by people from wider professions. Here are three reasons why.

Action research does not choose professions

Action research practitioners define action research as: “a common-sense approach to personal and professional development that enables practitioners everywhere to investigate and evaluate their work” (McNiff and Whitehead, 2012, p. 1). It starts from defining your own unique question or issue, and you adopt a systematic inquiry process to address that question. Stringer (2013) describes this systematic inquiry process as “Look, Think and Act”. Look is when you gather all the relevant information about your action, as well as the context which you are in, and try to define the situation. Think is when you analyse the situation from the gathered data and try to understand why things are as they are. Act is when you plan a course of action to help you improve your action as well as the situation based on your analysis, and implement the action. The important point here is that the question or issue which you are going to address can be anything. The topic can be professional or academic, or even personal. Action research does not choose context or certain professions, because it is a personal and intrinsic process of inquiry. This is why anybody, not just academics or business professionals but also any individuals or even students, can apply the idea of action research to address their own issues of interest.

The method is simple and flexible, and can easily be replicated

The structure of action research is simple and flexible. The “Look, Think and Act” model of inquiry by Stringer can be replicated or applied to your own unique context. At the moment, it is widely used by professional who work with people, such as educators, nurses and psychology professionals, but it can also be used by professionals such as engineers, manufacture and construction workers as well as the corporate management, because it can lead the work process as well as the whole organisation into kaizen (e.g. Vivan et al., 2016).

In action research, there is no fixed definite protocol for data collection or analysis. What data to collect and analyse should be determined by the researcher, or yourself. They can be anything that help you understand the situation; such as videos, photos, field notes including your own reflection and observation of the situation, or feedback from others. If you are a teacher working on improving the students’ understanding of science, the students’ notetakings, test scores, homework and the materials they developed can make a valuable source of information. If you are a business professional working in the customer services section of a company, such data as recordings of your phone conversation with clients, email communications and records of any interaction will be a valuable source of reflection. In action research, the researcher themselves is best placed to decide what data to collect and how they analyse it. This is why the structure of action research is simple and flexible, and applicable to any context of situation.

It focuses on the actor him/herself

Finally, the focus and target of action research is the actor themselves, not any others. In action research, there is no external force to determine whether your research outcomes are authentic or faulty, or reliable or unreliable, etc. This is the most significant difference from, for example, social research. Social research, and most other types of scientific research, focus on others; they investigate what they are doing and why they are as they are. Whereas action research studies about you, or about your own community. Action research focuses on understanding what you are doing and how you can improve the situation you are in. No other people can determine how you address the question, what data to collect, or what you gained. Of course, it is always a good practice to seek advice from others, such as your critical friends or an independent observed, but the heart of decision making is always yourself. And anything you gained, your reflection, insights, new skills or new theory, are valuable outcomes of your own action research.

Before I jumped into the world of teaching, I had been involved in different roles in a publisher for about 7 years. I experienced roles such as sales, customer services, administrative and secretarial roles, event coordination and so on. Looking back, I feel that the methods of action research can be applied to any of these roles in improving my practice in each respective role. I hope that action research will be recognised more widely in the future, not just academics or people in certain professions, but also professionals and students from wider fields.

Bibliography

McNiff, J., & Whitehead, J. (2012). Action research for teachers: A practical guide. Routledge.

Stringer, E. T. (2013). Action research. Sage Publications.

Vivan, A. L., Ortiz, F. A. H., & Paliari, J. C. (2016). Model for kaizen project development for the construction industry. Gestão & Produção, 23(2), 333–349.

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Shiori Kishi

Education student at CRI Paris, on a quest for a more literate world

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