Second Person Action Research

Second person action research or second person inquiry is the name often given to action research approaches that involve two or more people inquiring together about questions of mutual concern. In this form of research, the researchers and the research subjects are one and the same. Co-inquirers work together to identify and formulate inquiry questions, to determine the ways in which information will be gathered, to make sense of it and to act on their conclusions. Groups are small enough to have some significant relationship with each other, traditionally meeting face-to-face, although use is increasingly being made of online and virtual inquiry groups. Second person inquiry is widely used by action researchers and could be said to typify the underpinning values of action research, since a commitment to create collaboration, incorporate diverse perspectives and build mutual respect is a fundamental characteristic of this way of working.

The term second person inquiry was coined by Bill Torbert in 1998 to describe a particular quality of conversation and was subsequently developed by Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury in their 2001 Handbook of Action Research to mean all forms of collaborative, face-to-face inquiry. However, this way of working became established at least two decades earlier as ‘new paradigm’ researchers sought to find creative and collaborative ways of conducting research with human subjects who acknowledged, and even celebrated, their humanity and capacity for self-determination. Second person inquiry encompasses a wide range of practices from one-to-one conversations to large-group inquiry processes. The thinking behind this approach and significant variations in this range of work are explored below, together with the main skills required for this sort of action research practice.

Second person inquiry holds a particular place in the action research field because it claims that there is a form of knowing that concerns people in relationship with others. The idea of research with people rather than on them is held as a strong, informing value. John Heron, among others, argues that it is logically absurd to hold researchers as autonomous, meaning-making human agents but to treat the human subjects of research as if they are not equally self-determining. Mainstream research imposes meaning on human behaviour from the outside, as if researchers know what people are doing better than they themselves can. Furthermore, people are more than just thinking agents: They are sentient beings, who draw on experiential, symbolic, expressive and practical ways of knowing their world in addition to propositional sense making. Inquiry into the human experience, therefore, should try not to reduce all knowing to rational thinking. Humans encounter each other in ways that are tacit and cannot fully be described in language: The experience of relationship between persons, the act of encountering each other, is a vital and informing part of human life that is an inextricable part of how the world is understood and how knowledge of it is generated. Although there are certainly aspects of second person inquiry that draw on rationality, conversational approaches to inquiry that draw on a pragmatic tradition stemming from Dewey, at its fullest it is much more than group work or ‘putting heads together’ to solve problems: It is a way of trying to access and honour the tacit knowing of relationship, where experience is not.

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