Action research a Handbook for Students

participants. Sometimes researchers who are professionally prepared for quan-
titative, qualitative and mixed research transfer their skills by training partici-
pants who have no relevant experience in this area. It is illustrated by the afore-
mentioned Morris Justice Project in which researchers from the City University 
of New York trained the residents of the Bronx in quantitative data analysis 
methods [The Morris Justice Project: Participatory Action Research 2014]. Another 
example of including the community in the research process is the project Easy 
Targets/ Los Vulnerables carried out in the form of participatory action research 
by a collective composed of researchers from the University of Utah and a group 
of young people [The Public Science Project 2019]. The project concerned diffi-
culties experienced by the undocumented youth when they want to apply for 
college. The project applied visual research methods – young researchers used 
film footage as a method for recording opinions of various stakeholders of the 
process and to present the project results.
In the case of individual research, when the researcher is concerned mostly 
with analysing their own practice, the choice of methods is justified as always by 
the subject matter (Will the selected methods allow me to answer formulated 
research questions? Are the selected methods suitable for exploring the research 
problem?) as well as researcher’s skills (Can I reliably apply a given method and 
analyse research results?).
At the same time, we should remember that action research does not occur 
in the void and often in its course researchers clash with difficult social prob-
lems. Emotions which accompany the researcher raising difficult issues, or tack-
ling problematic phenomena (like violence, exclusion, mobbing and inequality 
in organisations) are very often overlooked in methodological discussions. An 
involved, or indeed “vulnerable” researcher [Liamputtong 2007] is sometimes 
a witness to pain, humiliation, or sense of indignity experienced by people with 
whom they conduct action research. Suitable choice of methods can (although 
not necessarily) help the researcher build strategies allowing them to conduct 
the research properly which can otherwise carry a heavy burden due to the ac-
companying emotional load. This situation is particularly difficult for young re-
searchers, including students who embark on their first action research. Entering 
the world of real organisations from the level of a pure, idealised image they get 
from academic textbooks, while sometimes difficult, is an extremely enriching 
experience.

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One of the accusations levelled at action research is that it sometimes does 
not observe methodological rigour, so its results cannot be considered reliable. 
To prevent that unjust judgement, researchers who want to solve a given prob-
lem should carefully select and then apply data collection methods, and then 
carry out a transparent analysis of such data. We should remember that meth-
odological rigour can be sometimes determined by attention to data triangula-
tion, adequate transcription of the collected material, or a diligent description of 
how narratives and interpretations are created on the basis of the collected data 
[Chen, Huang, Zeng 2018].
3.1 Selected methods of data collection and analysis
Siyu Chen, Fuquan Huang and Wenjie Zeng [2018] analysed academic pub-
lications from the years 2000‒2014 based on action research. On the basis of 
this literature review, they indicated the methods most commonly used for data 
collection and analysis. In their study, they divided the selected methods into 3 
types: methods selected by professional researchers, methods used by research