Quality in systemic action research

Much of the debate on action research quality has emerged in response to a perception that action research is vulnerable to arguments that it is not ‘scientifically’ robust. Various responses to this have been advanced. Checkland and Holwell's (1998) view is that because action research is not repeatable, the only way that it can claim validity is for it to clearly articulate its methodology in advance:

But this does not take into account the sorts of emergent processes that we have discussed in this book. Peter Reason and colleagues have argued (Bradbury and Reason, 2001; Reason, 2006) that within a participatory research paradigm a notion of quality is more important than notions of validity, attribution, reliability, repeatability and transferability. Validity is not relevant because it presumes one truth. Complexity theory renders the notion of linear causal attribution unrealistic. Reliability suggests that ‘experiments’ must be able to be repeated and produce the same result. But as we have seen, all social processes are contextually situated and subject to multiple influences. Not only is it impossible ever to repeat the same process, but even if you could, you would never get the same result. And as Greenwood and Levin point out, while generaliseability is still important, action research facilitators would not describe it in the same way as would positivist science:

Reason articulates a more emergent view of quality: