Action research (general relevance)

Participatory content analysis

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

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Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau (biography)

How can participatory action research with trusted community-based organizations ensure that communities most impacted take part in interpretating the data, turning findings into deeper insights and more meaningful community-led solutions?

Participatory content analysis is a final step in participatory action research and enables a community research team to analyze data to identify content themes, visually map relationships, and derive actionable insights based on local knowledge and lived expertise. The community research team comprises academic researchers, community-based organization partners, and “resident researchers,” who are community members recruited—with support from the community-based organization partners—from groups most impacted by the research area.

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Seven quality choice points for contemporary action research

By Hilary Bradbury.

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Hilary Bradbury (biography)

How can action researchers empower system actors in impactfully responding to our deepening eco-social crisis? How can action research be a catalyst to successfully transmute the inexhaustible resource of human creativity in all spaces—self to society—toward addressing our global problems? How can we encourage deepening clarity of choices made to navigate a middle path between responding to problems within living communities and contributing to research-based theory?

Mitigating the worst of our global problems requires action research that draws on many kinds and sources of knowledge. In fact, it requires drawing much more from diverse people on the ground, who understand the problems at hand and can offer solutions anchored in their experience of what is meaningful for them.

The aim of the seven choice points described below is to support action researchers in:

  • deepening and speeding up the proliferation of good work,
  • connecting local niche experiments to global reach.

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Transdisciplinary action research: A guiding framework for collaboration

By Steven Lam, Michelle Thompson, Kathleen Johnson, Cameron Fioret and Sarah Hargreaves

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1. Steven Lam; 2. Michelle Thompson; 3. Kathleen Johnson; 4. Cameron Fioret; 5. Sarah Hargreaves (biographies)

How can graduate students work productively with each other and community partners? Many researchers and practitioners are engaging in transdisciplinarity, yet there is surprisingly little critical reflection about the processes and outcomes of transdisciplinarity, particularly from the perspectives of graduate students and community partners who are increasingly involved.

Our group of four graduate students from the University of Guelph and one community partner from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, reflect on our experiences of working together toward community food security in Canada, especially producing a guidebook for farmer-led research (Fioret et al. 2018). As none of us had previously worked together, nor shared any disciplines in common, we found it essential to first develop a guiding framework for collaboration. Our thinking combined the following key principles from action research and transdisciplinarity:

  • reflexivity,
  • participation and partnership,
  • methods and process, and
  • integration.

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Let’s stop measuring and start improving

By Louise Locock

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Louise Locock (biography)

When we’re trying to improve the experience of health care, social care and other services users, is there a fast, rigorous way to include their perspectives that doesn’t involve repeatedly collecting new data from them and their families?

Measuring, understanding and improving people’s experience of services has become a priority. There is now an international focus (at least in the West) on person-centred care. The English National Health Service has led the way among health systems by introducing the first nationally mandated patient survey.

Despite the strong political and organisational focus on improving care, reports of unsatisfactory experience continue in even the best funded care systems.

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Improving health care services through Experience-based Co-design

By Glenn Robert and Annette Boaz

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1. Glenn Robert (biography)
2. Annette Boaz (biography)

There is lots of talk about the potential of co-creation as an approach to improving public services, but what does it actually look like (and do) in practice?

We describe one specific approach that has been used extensively for improving the quality of health care services: Experience-based Co-design.

Key Features and Stages

Experience-based Co-design draws on elements of participatory action research, user-centred design, learning theory and narrative-based approaches to change.

The key features of Experience-based Co-design are that it:

  1. places patients at the heart of a quality improvement effort working alongside staff to improve services
  2. maintains a focus on designing experiences (not just systems or processes).

It has six stages.

Stage 1 involves establishing the governance and project management arrangements.

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