Читать книгу 100 Questions (and Answers) About Action Research - Luke Duesbery - Страница 13

In formal or traditional research, no matter the field, a driving concern is generalizability. This means that results from a study, let’s say with a small group of people, apply to a larger group of people. For example, if you wanted to know if a medical procedure designed to alleviate symptoms of Alzheimer’s worked well, you would not need to try it on everyone with Alzheimer’s. Instead, you would test the innovation on a few and generalize to the larger population. If it works with a group of 50 people, then maybe it will work with 5 million people. Again, this is an objective of traditional, or positivist, research. From a small sample of people, data are generalized to a larger population of people. With traditional research, you would need to worry about complex issues related to the size and makeup of the group and whether they can represent the population.

With action research, you are not usually interested in a larger population. In a small business, you might be interested in how your local customers respond to a new product. This is the defining difference with action research—generalizability can be important, but not a priority. You are working under the assumption that your group, whether patients, customers, or students, remains similar from year to year. And so, what you find out this year will likely be the same as next year, and the year after that. The defining characteristic of action research is that you are the researcher, and you are interested in doing something to benefit your context. It is personal. Action research puts the you in research.

More questions? See questions 2, 21, and 37.