Creative/ Action Research

Action Research is a specialist area of knowledge within Hybrid. The company has carried out a number of research projects with action research as the underpinning methodology.

ybrid recommends action research as an approach because it produces workable outputs, leaves organisations stronger, and ensures opportunities for staff development after having carried out research for themselves, considered the problems and produced the solutions, facilitated by Hybrid within a creative learning framework.

Action research involves the study of a social/ environmental situation with a view to improving the quality of action within it. It must therefore involve enabling action. Other than this one premise, action research is open to a wide spectrum of possibilities that result in implementing change through a specific action, or series of actions within a social setting. The term ‘action research’ is therefore used to indicate the basic unity of theoretical and practical knowledge. Individuals develop practice themselves by starting the process of learning from their own experience, shifting the emphasis away from so called specialist researchers towards a self-monitoring and/ or self-evaluating approach.

Stakeholders affected by any planned changes have the primary responsibility for deciding on courses of action which seem likely to lead to improvement. The researchers are therefore key to both the activity and the identification of issues. Subsequently, their professional, or other, development is implicit – or may be made clearly explicit – within the process of action research. Hence, key to action research is that all those involved have learned and been empowered, in some way.

The emphasis of the research therefore changes from the production of a purely paper based report to the development of the research subjects as well as their social environment – and of course the identified problems or challenges.