I spent a few days trying to find out about this topic. There are a few papers that talk about implementing AR within a doctoral thesis, and I even discovered that someone in my DBA programme published a thesis using this approach a few years ago. But almost all of these paper (and especially the thesis) don't explain very well what AR is and they certainly don't explain how to use AR as the research method for a thesis.
I continued looking and eventually stumbled upon "You and Your Action Research" by Jean McNiff and Jack Whitehead. Amazon are selling this for silly money ($200.76!!!) so I'm glad I found the book in pdf format. Not only that, this is exactly the book that I need: it explains what research itself is, what action research is and how to conduct the research. Reading the opening chapters causes me to realise that I could have done with this book two or three years ago, and that huge swathes of my thesis will have to be rewritten.
I completed - as far as I was concerned - the literature review a week ago. One criticism that was raised during the viva was that I found and presented one model of engineering change - then stopped. I should have presented more models then contrasted between them. So the review as it currently stands has five separate models of engineering change along with commentary and comparison. Only now, after reading the opening chapters of YAYAR, I wonder whether I need any such models.
Continuing on from the literature review, I pasted in most of the theoretical methodology chapter that discusses various research paradigms. Again, it looks like this material will have to be heavily revised. Anyway, I hit a brick wall after the research paradigms because this is where my ideas are supposed to enter the thesis. So I contacted my supervisor in order to have a discussion that will take place tomorrow. Of course now the discussion will be far different to the one that I had originally planned. I think that I will spend the next month reading the book and contemplating what has to be added to the thesis, along with how I continue the research.
Going back to the opening paragraph, what is AR?
Action research is conducted by practitioners who regard themselves as researchers. It therefore goes by other names such as practice-based research, practitioner research, practitioner-led research and practitioner-based research. The practice base of action research means that all people in all contexts who are investigating the situation they are in can become researchers, regardless of their age, status, social setting, or social or professional positioning. The situations may be in virtually any context – in the workplace, in the home or in an aeroplane – and in any personal or professional arena. Because action research is always done by practitioners within practitioners within a particular social situation, it is insider research, not outsider research, which means that the researcher is inside the situation, and will inevitably influence what is happening by their presence... This is one reason why action research is so popular: it puts practitioners in control of their own practices – but this also carries the responsibilities of offering explanations for those practices.
The ‘action’ of action research is always about improving practice, however practice is understood. Processes of social improvement begin with personal improvement, and personal improvement is grounded in personal learning. Think about the idea of action, as outlined above. You can watch television; this is usually understood as ‘activity’, without involving ideas about improvement. When the action is about contributing to other people’s learning, however, it must involve ideas about improvement. Investigating how the action has contributed to improvement becomes a process of knowledge creation; offering explanations for how and why this has happened becomes a process of theory generation. Action research is different from traditional social scientific research, which aims to understand and describe a social situation in terms of something ‘out there’.
It is a process that helps you as a practitioner to develop a deep understanding of what you are doing as an insider researcher, so it has both a personal and social aim. The personal aim is to improve your learning in order to use that learning to help you improve your behaviours. Its social aim is to contribute to other people’s learning to help them improve their behaviours. Both are equally important and interdependent. When you make your research public by writing and disseminating your report and ideas, you offer an account of how your learning may or may not have influenced the situation.
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