Action research

2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davydd J. Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Action Research ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Theory Method ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
Harsh Critique

This article examines how and why the academically-based social sciences, both pure and applied, have lost their relevance to practical human affairs (praxis) and links this discussion to the reasons why action research is a marginal activity in the academic and policy worlds. It also contains a harsh critique of action research practice focused on action researchers’ combined sense of moral superiority over conventional researchers and general complacency about fundamental issues of theory, method, and validity. The central argument is that “doing good” is not the same as “doing good social research” and that we action researchers need to hold ourselves accountable to higher standards, not only to compete with conventional social research but for the benefit of the non-academic stakeholders in action research projects.

In-between practice: working in the ‘thirdspace’ of sensory and multimodal methodology

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hurdley ◽  
Bella Dicks
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Sensory Ethnography ◽  
New Space

This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects — an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and ‘reading’ practices — opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants’ and researchers’ worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants’ interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the ‘sensory turn’ centres the sensuous, bodied person — participant, researcher and audience/reader — as the ‘place’ for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps — between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.

scholarly journals Upublicznienie niewidzialnego: archiwum wizualne i intelektualista-praktyk

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-239
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Chajbos ◽  
Waldemar Rapior
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Internet Archive ◽  
Visual Materials

This article was written on the basis of the project ‘See Culture: The Archive of Visual Materials from Research into Culture in Poland’ conducted in 2014. It speaks of the internet creation of a social database using visual materials—the Visual Archive (archiwumwizualne.pl). The authors present their findings from interviews with members of the research teams and directors of the projects that were included in the internet archive. These primarily concern the various approaches and research practices of the interlocutors and their definitions of visual material’s potential as a tool in social research. The profiles of the researchers presented earlier is then compared to the category of the practice-oriented intellectual, which broadens the classical understanding of the intellectual and points to an emerging manner of thinking about research practice in contemporary social sciences. The usefulness of the Visual Archive for the practice-oriented intellectual is indicated.

scholarly journals Investigar en cárceles. Apuntes para futuros científicos sociales

2019 ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Antonio Viedma Rojas ◽  
Consuelo Del Val Cid ◽  
Javier Callejo Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Professional Experience ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Practical Research ◽  
Social Observation

Este documento es el resultado de una reflexión sobre las posibilidades y dificultades de la observación social empírica en la cárcel, desde la preocupación por la enseñanza de la metodología sociológica aplicada a las titulaciones universitarias de criminología. Lo aquí expuesto se apoya en la experiencia práctica que los autores han acumulado a través de múltiples estudios realizados en España y en distintos países de Iberoamérica. Una primera versión del texto fue creada para ser utilizada como apuntes prácticos de investigación para estudiantes de criminología que comenzaban su formación y no tenían por tanto experiencia profesional en este campo de estudio. A esa versión se le han introducido las adaptaciones oportunas para que pueda ser utilizado de manera más general por investigadores y estudiantes de ciencias sociales que necesiten una guía básica de diseño y ejecución de proyectos de investigación social en cárceles. El texto tiene una orientación didáctica, es una propuesta que ofrece claves para mejorar la enseñanza y aplicación de la metodología de investigación en los sistemas penitenciarios.This article is the result of a reflection on the possibilities and difficulties of empirical social observation in prison, from the perspective of sociological methodology teaching applied to university degrees in criminology. What is here exposed is based on the practical experience accumulated by the authors via multiple studies carried out in Spain and in different Ibero-American countries. A first draft of this text was created with the purpose of being used as practical research notes for students of criminology who began their training and had no professional experience in this field of study. This version has been adapted, so that it may be used generally by researchers and students of social sciences who need a basic guide to the design and execution of social research projects in prisons. The paper assumes a didactic orientation; it is a proposal that offers guidelines to improve the teaching and application of the research methodology in the penitentiary systems.

scholarly journals Teachers as researchers: Reflecting on the challenges of research–practice partnerships between school and university in Chile

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-438
Author(s):  
Gonzalo R. Guerrero-Hernández ◽  
Rocío A. Fernández-Ugalde
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Teacher Researchers

Teachers have tended to be underestimated as experts of their own practice and relegated to a technical role. In this context, action research appears as a form to legitimate teachers as active agents and producers of educational knowledge. This article aims to examine how a collaborative research–practice partnership between schools and universities in Chile fosters teachers’ role as researchers. It adopts a qualitative methodology based on thematic analysis of data collected from questionnaires and focus groups. In particular, it reports perceptions of in-service teacher researchers who conducted research projects between 2016 and 2017 as a part of a researcher–practitioner partnership strategy implemented by a university in Chile. The findings suggest that the partnerships were highly valued among teachers because the partnerships allowed them to develop pedagogical reflection towards the improvement of their practices and required particular awareness and recognition of roles and the relationships between practical and theoretical knowledge. Finally, possibilities for strengthening teachers’ role as researchers and collaborative research are presented at the end of the article.

Unmet challenges and unfulfilled promises in action research

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olav Eikeland
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Theory Method ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Current Action ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
The One ◽  
Second Wave

This article is a response to Davydd J. Greenwood’s critical review of defensiveness and sloppiness in the current action research (AR) community. My experience of the situation in AR coincides to a large degree with Greenwood’s. His claims are hard to test, however, since he hardly gives concrete examples. In order to sort out real “sloppiness” (whatever that is), we have to take into consideration the conditions under which most AR to work. I also think Greenwood’s contention that AR suffers from “complacency about fundamental issues of theory, method and validity” has to do with fundamental changes in AR’s self-understanding between “old AR” before 1965 and “the second wave” from the 1970s on. Personally I recommend an AR-strategy — immanent critique — that balances between “morally superior, but sloppy and complacent AR” on the one hand and “conventional social research” (whatever that is nowadays), but find it hard to find much support in the AR community, for reasons, I believe, that have to do with the mentioned fundamental change in justification-strategy and self-conception within AR. At the end I announce some issues I would like to discuss further, but for which I lack the space in this article.

Action Engagement: Improving Researchers’ Involvement in Action Research Projects

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Rolfsen ◽  
Arild Johnsen ◽  
Gaute Knutstad
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Research Projects

The Edwards' Report and the International Relations profession

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Science Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science Community

The Economic and Social Research Council recently published a Report commissioned from a committee chaired by Professor Edwards, a psychiatrist, so that the Council, and the social science community in general, might know what was good and bad in British social sciences, and where the promising future research opportunities lie over the next decade. Boldly called ‘Horizons and Opportunities in the Social Sciences’, the Report condensed the wisdom of social scientists, both British and foreign, and concludes with a broadly but not uncritically favourable picture of the British scene.

REVIEW OF SOCIAL RESEARCH IN POLAND ON THE SARS-CoV-2 PANDEMIC IN THE LIGHT OF THE FUZZY REASONING PARADIGM

2021 ◽  
Vol 563 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Stochmal ◽  
Jan Maciejewski ◽  
Andrzej Jarynowski
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Secondary Analysis ◽  
Fuzzy Reasoning ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions

The article presents the results of the secondary analysis of qualitative and quantitative data in relation to social research conducted in Poland during the pandemic. The research results were introduced on the basis of analyzes of 180 projects carried out by scientific and commercial institutions in the period from January to May 2020. The aim of the project is to present a standard way of conducting empirical research for social researchers who undertake the challenge of identifying the phenomena accompanying the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. We are interested in the possibility of drawing conclusions that go beyond individual research projects carried out in the social field. The conclusions recommended by us concern the following issues: mitigating the polarization of social attitudes dynamically changing during a pandemic, practical solving – and not only diagnosing – problems revealed in COVID reality and supplementing the deficiencies of theoretical assumptions accompanying research works.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document