Trusting Practitioner Research Results

It has been effectively communicated over the years that all research is really a kind of argument for truth and meaning. The practitioner researcher wants to know if study findings are a good representation of what is happening concerning his practice. This idea is often referred to in terms of study validity, a concept associated with all three traditions of research introduced earlier: technical or instrumental, interpretive or critical, and practical. In the case of practical or practitioner research, many ideas about what makes studies valid are similar to those of most interpretive or critical approaches. The following is a set of questions the practitioner researcher should answer to make a convincing argument that the results found are relatively trustworthy.

• Are the researcher's biases and other preformed expectations transparently known and therefore recognized for their potential influence on any findings?
• How natural and real do the findings appear in representing how things usually transpire in the work setting?
• Are the findings complete enough to be fully representative of the practice under study?
• Are the findings really meaningful to the professional in a way that makes them useful for change and improvement?

As practitioners move through this research process and gain more confidence and experience, more involved and complex practitioner research designs are possible. When professionals are ready to conduct these studies, additional study validity issues may be addressed as well. These are two additional validity questions for these advanced investigations:

• Were results confirmed by audiences by asking members if the findings made sense in their experience (called member checking)?
• Did using more than one source for data and more than one method of collecting the data (called triangulation) confirm results?

A final test of any set of research findings should be the extent to which it is consistent with the professional's knowledge of her practice and the profession. Although profoundly underappreciated as producers of research, professionals know considerably more than outside researchers about good practice and what should be done given the overwhelming number of varied situations in which they must make decisions in the moment. Schön (1983) contends, for example, that professionals are “able to describe deviations from the norm in their area of expertise … without describing the norm itself. … [T]hey can spontaneously perform tasks which they are unaware of having learned or be able to express” (quoted in House & Lapan, 1988, p. 75). This is a kind of tacit knowing that effective professionals already have but are often unable to explain. Yet they can apply this knowledge to their own practice by solving problems in their everyday world. Further, practitioners should take full advantage of this tacit knowledge or “knowing-in-action” when judging the quality of their own practitioner research findings. While testing their results against the list of validity checks presented earlier, in the final analysis professionals in the process of self-reflection should ask the following question: Does this fit with what I know about my work?