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Critical Reference Group
Action research has firm historical roots in a dialectic interchange between the Global North and the Global South and has gained its strength through collaborative partnerships between those with expertise in research methods and knowledge of social change theory and those who are most intimately affected by the issue at hand. Action research efforts hold greater potential to create meaningful change when the research team includes the people most affected by the problem being studied—the people whose lives the action research project aims to improve. Yoland Wadsworth coined the term critical reference group for the group of people the action research primarily intends to help, whose problems the action research seeks to solve. Ideally, the action research team centres its work on the critical reference group's most pressing issues. This entry offers ways to identify these groups and work in partnership with a full circle of stakeholders in creating new avenues for health and equity. We conclude by describing a project that brought Hmong women's previously unheard voices into the centre of action research.
Locating the Critical Reference Group: Eliminating Margins
Oftentimes in traditional research projects, people in the critical reference group have been subjects or mere participants in the research process. Action research at its best determines the research question from the lens of the critical reference group and is organized in such a way that people from the critical reference group are fully involved in discerning how best to collect and analyze the data, deciding how to disseminate the results and planning meaningful actions to create change.
The critical reference group is not always immediately revealed. Action research teams must gaze widely to question who is most at risk, who is often overlooked, and who has been previously silenced in other projects. Specifically asking who is at the heart of the research question(s) often reveals the group(s) most affected. Furthermore, action research teams must critically question what potential untoward effects might arise from their work. What groups could be harmed in the quest for information? What outcome indicators must be collected and analyzed to ensure that a new vulnerable group is not created by our actions? Encouraging a community-level understanding of ethical issues, Edison Trickett gave the example of a project that aimed to reduce sexually transmitted infections through the creation of a government-sponsored brothel. The project succeeded in reducing sexually transmitted infections, but it also resulted in increased marital discord and divorce. The focus of concern expanded from sex workers and their clients to the partners and children adversely affected by divorce. To identify and expand the critical reference group, action research teams critically analyze who might be adversely affected by the issue being studied as well as who might be adversely affected by the research process or the community-based actions that result.
Blending Many Voices: Working from Polyvocality
Action research that includes the critical reference group as full partner involves movement from one group researching and another being researched to a collaborative exploration—a movement from a divided them and us to a collective, collaborative we. Bill Genat went further to suggest privileging the critical reference group so that new meanings can be incubated and situated local knowledge and theory can be recognized through the process of active, collaborative engagement. Carol Pavlish and Margaret Pharris concurred with this approach, pointing out that when all stakeholders in the phenomenon being studied engage in critical, inclusive dialogue about the meaning of the data analysis findings, and the experience of those who are adversely affected is fully understood by all, barriers to human flourishing can be thoroughly, systematically and enthusiastically deconstructed by people on all sides of the barriers.
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- Alinsky, Saul
- Argyris, Chris
- Bateson, Gregory
- Boal, Augusto
- Chataway, Cynthia Joy
- Dewey, John
- Emery, Fred
- Fals Borda, Orlando
- Freire, Paulo
- Gadamer, Hans-Georg
- Horton, Myles
- Kincheloe, Joe
- Lewin, Kurt
- marino, dian
- Martín-Baró, Ignacio
- Nielsen, Kurt Aagaard
- Noffke, Susan
- Schön, Donald
- Toulmin, Stephen
- Whyte, William Foote
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig
- Academic Discourse
- Agency
- Appreciative Intelligence
- Authenticity
- Bakhtinian Dialogism
- Bildung
- Community of Inquiry
- Communities of Practice
- Conscientization
- Critical Friend
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- Dialogue
- Double-Loop Learning
- Empowerment
- Engaged Scholarship
- Hegemony
- Heteroglossia
- Heutagogy
- Identity
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- Metaphor
- Non-Indigenous Ally
- Organizational Culture
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- Tacit Knowledge
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- Tempered Radical
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- Vivencia
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- Epistemology
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- Experiential Learning
- Extended Epistemology
- Hawaiian Epistemology
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- Ubuntu
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- Generalizability
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- Integrating Grounded Theory
- Intersubjectivity
- Meta-Methodology
- Mode 1 and Mode 2 Knowledge Production
- Quality
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- Transferability
- Validity
- Antigonish Movement
- Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice
- Collaborative Action Research Network
- Community Design Centres
- Community-University Partnership Programme
- Community-Campus Partnerships for Health
- Community-University Research Partnerships
- Cornell Participatory Action Research Network
- Dig Where You Stand Movement
- Disabled People's Organizations
- Global Alliance for Community-Engaged Research
- Gonogobeshona
- Grameen Bank
- Highlander Research and Education Center
- Institute of Development Studies
- International Council for Adult Education
- International Participatory Research Network
- Jipemoyo Project
- LGBT
- Maya Women of Chajul
- Mondragón Co-Operatives
- Norwegian Industrial Democracy Movement
- Office of Community-Based Research
- Research Initiatives, Bangladesh
- Social Movement Learning Movement
- Society for Participatory Research in Asia
- Tavistock Institute
- Work Research Institute, The
- World Congresses of Action Research
- Action Turn, The
- Aesthetics
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- Workers' Participation in Occupational Health and Safety
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- Dissertation Writing
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- Teaching Action Researchers
- Christian Spirituality of Action
- Confucian Principles
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- Karma Theory
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- Mindful Inquiry
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- Social Constructionism
- Social Learning
- Socio-Technical Systems
- Symbolic Interactionism
- Theories of Action
- Asset Mapping
- Force Field Analysis
- Geographic Information Systems
- Ladder of Inference
- Ladder of Participation
- Learning Pathways Grid
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