A great intro to “Participatory Action Research” by Yoland Wadsworth

http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/ari/p-ywadsworth98.html

excerpt here:
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We are looking for our daughter’s shoes in the early morning scramble. We review previous ‘historical data’ (memories of earlier experiences!) as part of planning our ‘research design’. We generate several hypotheses and move quickly into the ‘field’ to involve other participants and gather new data to test them! We use some observational anthropology. Two brief interviews with daughter and sibling result in reports of failed hunches! (they weren’t in their cupboards or on the back verandah!); we engage in further open-ended interviews with the entire household population. Then secondary analysis of the previous day’s timetable generates a further hunch (Sports Day!: shoes replaced with runners) and an additional round of observation reveals: shoes in school bag!These trivial microcosms contain a structure which reliably:

* commences – ironically – with stopping. That is, we do not begin to inquire until we actually suspend our current action because of the:
* raising of a question; which then provokes us to go about:
* planning ways to get answers – ways which will involve identifying and involving ‘questioners’, ‘the questioned’ and an idea of for who or for what we desire answers;
* engaging in fieldwork about new, current or past action in order to get answers and improve our experiential understanding of the problematic situation;
* generating from the ‘answers’ an imaginative idea of what to do to change and improve our actions;
* the putting into practice of the new actions (followed by further stopping, reflecting and possible ‘problematisation’).