Читать книгу 100 Questions (and Answers) About Action Research - Luke Duesbery - Страница 17

You will read this phrase throughout this book: It depends. The duration of an action research project really does depend on many different elements, like your question, skill set, participant availability, and so on. All of these are covered in more detail in this book. For example, imagine that you are a teacher and want to know if there is a difference between females and males in your class on statewide test scores for math. All you would need to do is to pull your students’ scores from the state database and then analyze the data. Similarly, if you are a social worker you might want to add a question or two to your mental health intake paperwork and then look at the responses. Both are pretty quick projects, maybe 3 hours each. Not too bad, but what does it really get you? Not much, except those answers could be an entrée to forming more complex questions.

To continue with the examples, let’s say males outscore females on these tests, or that mental health clients are suspicious of giving out their personal information. As a teacher or mental health professional, you want to change these circumstances. For either discipline, the process is the same. You would search the literature for effective interventions (~4 hours), implement changes during a specified time frame (~10 hours total), collect and structure data (~5 hours), analyze data (~4 hours), and report out your findings (~2 hours). In sum, about 25 hours. Seems like a lot, so you are probably saying that there is no way you can do that in the normal scope of your work. You would be right, and we wouldn’t recommend that. However, throughout this book, we discuss ways to integrate action research into your daily routine, not add to it. Further, when you become facile in integrating action research into your daily work life, you will find that you become a more inquisitive and effective practitioner with what we call an action research disposition. This disposition is an approach to asking and answering questions of the world, and it lasts a lifetime.

More questions? See questions 5, 6, and 7.