Reseaching for Quality: A Case for Action Research in Early Childhood Services

This article argues that improvements in the quality of young children's educational experiences could be assisted by greater use of fourth generation’ action research. A case is built for an increase in research for’ quality improvement in early childhood services as opposed to research ‘about’ quality improvement, through comparing and contrasting the implications for educational practice of the ethical and epistemological underpinnings of positivist, phenomenological and critical social science research traditions. It is argued that action research, informed by the ethics and epistemology of critical social science, offers one way of initiating such research.