Key Ideas

• Practitioner action research, introduced by Lewin (1946,1948), is an approach used by practicing professionals for individual reflection and shared study related to important social issues.
• Although practitioner action research is often conducted as critical social action, interpretive practical reasoning is an equally common application for professionals.
• Practitioner research as practical reasoning is characterized by professional self-reflection, tight time frames, and a work-related focus that is intended to improve practice.
• One useful format for implementing practitioner research, adapted from Kemmis and McTaggart (1982), offers a sequence of focusing, planning, acting, observing, reflecting, and revising, ordinarily followed by refocusing to initiate a new practitioner study.
• Stimulated recall is an underused but significant strategy practitioners can use to reflect on work-related decision making, especially those in highly interactive professions, such as counseling, community organizing, and teaching.
• Practitioner researchers should begin with small studies using tight study cycles and should involve colleagues in the research to create a culture of inquiry.
• Study validity can be checked by recognizing the practitioner researcher's biases, determining how natural and relevant the findings appear, and exhausting any potential alternative interpretations of the results.
• The practitioner researcher's professional knowledge is the most important validity test when findings are judged in comparison with that knowledge.

Although the main emphasis in this text is to explain qualitative research approaches to readers who are likely to be consumers of research studies, this chapter is an important exception in that nearly all professionals can readily apply the research designs described here. Practitioner action research (often called action research or participatory action research) is an investigative approach that emphasizes careful and systematic study by professionals interested in individual or shared self-reflection. Those who might use this form of research include architects, lawyers, social workers, educators, nurses, physicians, and most other professionals who want to more formally examine everyday issues of professional practice. As practitioner studies unfold, they are usually organized so that an individual or a small group of professionals can investigate these topics through the process of selecting issues, planning, collecting data, analyzing results, and reflecting on these findings by translating them into revised practice. A potential application could involve a team of physicians using a traditional experimental framework comparing different treatments of patients with similar conditions. In a more nontraditional qualitative application, a community activist group might study how to change state health policies, or a school principal could use practitioner action research to study ways to reduce school dropouts.

Practitioner action researchers using a traditional approach might ask research questions similar to these:

1. Does laboratory science significantly improve student learning when compared to textbook instruction?
2. Is this family of drugs more effective than another type for reducing cholesterol in patients over sixty-five years old?
3. Do lawyers who pass the bar exam in their first attempt make significantly higher salaries than those who fail the first try?

Practitioner action researchers who come from a nontraditional orientation think differently about how to approach research and what questions to ask. These are three examples of such questions:

1. What do we need to know to resolve the unemployment problems in our community?
2. How can we increase parent involvement in our after-school programs?
3. How can I more effectively explain treatment options to my patients?

Traditional researchers approach practitioner action research by using positivist ideas about conducting these studies, depending on experiments and similar plans to design and implement their studies. But, as the preceding questions imply, nontraditional investigators focus more on trying ideas to see if they work.

Nontraditional practitioner action research studies are seldom designed in a longer-term framework as most research tends to be. Instead they are likely to be scheduled and structured as small, manageable plans whereby data are collected in a time frame of less than an hour, although they can extend for up to a week or two depending on the nature and breadth of the research questions. The shorter study schedule is employed so that a practitioner can plan and carry out each investigation and immediately apply findings for reflection and adjustment in subsequent practice. Traditional applications may follow this pattern or adhere to the more typical long-term format.