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Stringer, Ernest T. (2004). Action research in
education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice
Hall.
248 pp.
$30 ISBN: 0-13-097425-0
Reviewed by Eugene Bartoo
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
September 13, 2004
Stringer’s book on action research in education is one
of the latest in a string of textbooks that treat research as
context bound and that exhort teachers and others connected with
the schooling enterprise to actively participate in it. As such
the book is both a critique of traditional approaches to
educational research and a textbook on doing research of the kind
favored by Stringer. It is part of an explosion of textbooks
representing one side of the qualitative/quantitative
“paradigm war” and can be seen as comfortably within
the company of books extolling the benefits of practitioner
research.
There are some strong points in Stringer’s book that
deserve mention at the outset. The writing is accessible and the
organization of the book presents an orderly view of how this
approach to action research works. There are nine chapters, a
fairly complete list of references, and an index. The final
chapter has a useful list of URLs about action research and
anyone who teaches in schools of education these days must
provide and help students deal with these resources. The
penultimate chapter has a collection of nine action research
examples which are remarkable in their diversity of approaches
and purposes. These reports are used by Stringer throughout the
earlier chapters as illustrations of various points he is trying
to make. There are also numerous short vignettes placed
throughout the text in which Stringer recounts his own
experiences in the field much as if he were teaching in a live
classroom. It is clear that this textbook is meant to support a
course on doing action research for practicing teachers. As such
it is a direct competitor to Mill’s book on action research
(Mills, 2003) which enjoys great popularity in schools of
education in the U.S. as a text for masters degree level courses
on practitioner research.
I want to take issue, however, with three major features of
Stringer’s book. The first and largest issue is the place
of action in his approach to action research. The second is more
abstract and grows out of my concerns for the first. What is it
exactly that the research of the kind promoted by Stringer is
designed to yield? Is it knowledge, or is it understanding, or
is it meaning? The third is that the emphasis on group consensus
and the psychology of the participants raises the possibility of
creating the kind of undesirable situations that science and
research purport to ameliorate.
The action in action research
Apparently for Stringer, planning for action is the
consequence of inquiry. The identification of the problem to be
investigated (chapter three), the collection of information
(chapter four), and the analysis of that information (chapter
five) is communicated (chapter six) in the form of a plan of
action (chapter seven). The first four parts of that sequence
are ordinarily found in most books on research and presenting the
results of the research is ordinarily where research ends. The
chapter on action is, presumably, what makes this an action
research text. The chapter on action has a nice overview of
various levels of planning in schools. There are sections on
overall planning, lesson planning, curriculum planning,
evaluation planning, professional development planning, community
planning, and strategic planning. Stringer’s action
research is research devoted to developing plans for action, but
doesn’t necessarily require the action itself. To put it
another way, research is put in the service of action. Whatever
it is that is the result of the inquiry is communicated to a
public or publics of interest and is then used as a basis for
action.
This is not, on the face of it, foreign to a considerable
segment of the various approaches to action research. Action
research is intended as a democratic group process with high
degrees of participation by those involved in and affected by the
issues under investigation and the results of the investigation
are meant to be put into action. Furthermore, the process of
group investigation has an array of social, psychological, and
political purposes that go beyond the traditional epistemological
concerns of science. At least one of those purposes is to build
moral and political motivation for taking action among the
participants. Motivation is, presumably, the major force
demanding the action. If the research is carried out with due
attention to participation then the participants would be
“fired up” enough to demand, or take action.
Beyond psychological readiness, there is neither a connection
of the action itself with the rest of the research process nor is
there a connection of the research with the plans for action. In
order for this to occur some attention would need to be given to
just how the results of the research guides the action. Plans
for action are a methodological concern in the same way that the
conclusions drawn from data analysis are a methodological
concern. Good planning ought to be driven by good inquiry and
any competent book on planning must deal with the connections
between the process leading to planning and what is planned. One
would think that a book on action research would be about
research and action and the connections between them. However,
Stringer’s book is not such a book. The planning for
action and the action itself are expected but not demanded.
So if action is not methodologically contingent on the
research, then action has the same relationship to
Stringer’s action research that application (i.e.,
practice) has to much of the traditional forms of research that
Stringer’s action research is meant to critique. In the
traditional forms, research is carried out by an objective
researcher, sometimes in situ and sometimes not. The
results of the research are presented to the public and whatever
practical use might be made of that research awaits some sort of
translation process by some other group of people. In
Stringer’s action research, inquiry is carried out by a
researcher and the participants themselves, always in
situ, and the results of the research remain to be carried
out by, hopefully, the participants, but possibly by others. The
relationship of research to action is the same in both cases.
This is more than an innocuous similarity. It suggests that
whatever it is that research is supposed to produce, the same
thing that is produced by traditional research is produced by
Stringer’s action research. Since they both produce the
same thing and this is a critique of traditional research as well
as a handbook on a better form of research, we need to look at
what it is that Stringer is critiquing and what it is that he is
promoting and how the result of doing what he is promoting is
more warranted, useful, and moral.
The old and the new paradigms
In the first two chapters Stringer presents his view of action
research; its purposes and how action research is to be
distinguished from what he calls objective science. Research is
defined as a systematic investigation leading to understanding
and, we presume, that action research is also a systematic
investigation which leads to understanding which leads to
action. Action research, we are told, should be characterized by
“change,” “reflection,”
“participation,” “inclusion,”
“sharing,” “understanding,”
“repetition,” “practice,” and
“community” (pg. 5). These characteristics are
within the tradition of action research that traces its roots to
Kurt Lewin where action research promotes democratic social
action (Greenwood, 1998). It has a strong socio-political thrust
that is meant to override and correct the problems produced by
the reductionism of the more typical research endeavors in social
settings. Stringer asserts that action research uses methods
that are the antithesis to what he identifies as
“positivism.” He equates quantitative measurement
and hypothesis driven experimental design with positivism and
promotes instead the qualitative methods such as the interview,
focus groups, observation, and self-reports that he identifies as
naturalistic inquiry (Lincoln, 1985).
In chapter two, he is careful not to equate
“methods” with “paradigm” and emphasizes
that action research represents a newer paradigm that is less
concerned with the search for certainty and more concerned with
understanding people’s emerging, subjective experience. A
variety of methods might be used but they must fit within one
paradigm. Otherwise the novice is confused and the investigation
is damaged. This discussion about paradigms and methods,
however, is confused and confusing. Stringer’s
descriptions of positivism are wrong at nearly every point
(Phillips, 2000), pp. 11 – 14). He asserts on the one hand
that quantitative methods can be used in qualitative studies and
qualitative methods can be used in quantitative studies, but he
rejects out-of-hand the experiment as a method and the hypothesis
as a way to pose the research question. Yet the experiment is a
specific case of observation which Stringer promotes as a data
gathering method and a hypothesis is a way to both ask a question
about the existence of certain characteristics of a phenomenon
and to ask whether there is a relationship between the
characteristics. In another section he asserts that the only way
to generalize results is through random sampling (not true;
consider Piaget) and that qualitative studies shouldn’t use
“fixed variables” (an oxymoron?).
Further confusion is evident in his table on page 16 which
places scientific positivism (which we now wonder if that is what
it really is) along side naturalistic inquiry. The juxtaposition
raises questions at almost each comparison. For example, some of
the verbs under scientific positivism are: Hypothesizes,
measures, uses (statistical analyses), seeks (explanations) and
those under naturalistic inquiry on the same line of comparison
are: Explores, describes, uses (interpretive measures), seeks
(to understand). Surely he is not promoting a rigid difference
between statistical analyses and interpretive measures, or
explanation and understanding. These are not rigid dichotomies,
but degrees of difference.
In discussing further his paradigm, Stringer begs the question
as to whether the thing is even scientific. Besides using the
terms “positivist science” and “science”
interchangeably, he asserts that the core of the function of
action research is to investigate the meanings of the
“life-worlds” of the participants through certain
interpretive processes. These meanings are implicit and the job
of the researcher is to unpack these implicit meanings. However,
he doesn’t discuss just what counts as understanding the
meaning of someone else’s life-world or even what counts as
meaning. The researcher is to create a climate of trust and
community in which these meanings, presumably, will surface and
then to report them.
There is a lot of heavy philosophical baggage underneath all
of this discussion of paradigm and method and it is
understandable that Stringer might not want to get the text
bogged down in such abstractions. What, I think, he is trying to
explain is the basis by which we can bring meaning to our own
experience in such a way that it can be shared with others and
understood by others. The basis that much of science has used up
through the middle of the twentieth century is to verify the
meaning of our experience by matching it to fundamental reality.
There were two major problems with this basis; the means of
verification were shown to be contentious on their own merits
and, the growing notion that if there were such a thing as a
fundamental reality we could never know it. Social science had
particular problems using this approach because they dealt with
people rather than objects of nature so they begged the question
of fundamental reality by emphasizing confidence in
interpretation rather than the verification of interpretation.
Confidence in interpretation for social science is found through
a process that is necessarily communal. A strong example is the
use of operational definitions.
It is ironic that for all of Stringer’s assertions that
action research is a break with traditional research, he is
proposing an approach well within the traditions of normal social
science. Stringer is promoting ethnography as his method and his
paradigm might be called operationalism. However, while he pays
attention to the necessity of systematic procedures or operations
he avoids much discussion of the epistemic. That is, whatever it
is that we come up with as a meaning of experience is accepted if
it is found by using communal, ethical, and open procedures.
There is little or no discussion of the bases for acceptance
other than following procedures. This is problematic and
possibly dangerous and I want to elaborate on this in the next
section.
There is at least another philosophical approach to inquiry
that should be mentioned here. Pragmatism offers a solution to
some of the problems Stringer has in getting at ways to fashion
meaning. For the pragmatist, at least the pragmatism of John
Dewey, the epistemic concerns (i.e. whether our interpretations
of experience are “true”) are prospective rather than
retrospective (Kaplan, 1964, pp. 36 - 46). The approach is not
to try to inquire into the truth of our retrospective
experience but to inquire into the consequences of our
interpretations if they were true. This approach also has knotty
problems to be struggled with, but it has certain distinct
advantages. One of the largest is that it demands that action be
a part of the inquiry.
Let me go back to one of the confusions in Stringer as an
example. Stringer uses the terms behavior and act
interchangeably, but they are not the same. A behavior is
something shared by objects and humans and, it is open to
observation by all. An act can only be interpreted if one knows
the intentions behind the act. The intentions of the actor prior
to the act and thus the meaning of the act is bound up with its
consequences. This is critically important in an inquiry process
engaging a group of practitioners for it is the consequences of
practice that shapes not only the practitioner, but the social
group. It is a consensus about consequences that forms a
cohesive and effective group of practitioners.
The possibility of group-think
There is a figure at the center of Stringer’s process of
research. He refers to the figure as the
“researcher.” Whereas the researcher could be a
fellow teacher, administrator, or parent as well as someone from
a university, this figure occupies a central presence and seems
to be imbued with an aura of objectivity. The researcher is
admonished to be fair, ethical, and collegial; more a facilitator
than a remote expert. Yet it is the researcher that interprets
the interviews and observations and other sources of data. The
researcher must continually check her interpretations with the
participants in the inquiry, but nonetheless, the researcher is
not, herself, a participant. In the section on observation in
chapter four, for example, Stringer calls this method participant
observation, but the process he describes denies it. The
observer is passive; watching, recording, and interpreting.
To be fair, the interpretations made of interviews and
observations are frequently shared with the participants and
presumably revised to resolve misinterpretations. Yet how do we
decide when an interpretation is wrong and from whose viewpoint?
In some fashion the individual interpretations of the experiences
of the participants gets translated into a collective by the
researcher. If the meaning of individual experiences is made the
collective through the work of the researcher then how are we to
be sure that the researcher is not just co-opting the
participants in the service of some central planning authority?
Apparently the answer is that we just have to trust the
researcher. In several places in the text where one would expect
a listing of criteria to be used in making judgments about how
data is to be treated, we find the criteria oriented toward
achieving group consensus. The researcher is the group guru, the
therapist, the trusted advisor, the facilitator. There is a
place for such a person in social groups, but in a book about
research one would expect the criteria for trust to include
criteria for the basis of that trust beyond exhorting the
researcher to be friendly, open, ethical, and responsive.
One extended example might make the case about the possible
dangers here. Stringer starts the data collection with the
interview. The people to be interviewed are
“stakeholders”, or rather representatives of
stakeholder groups. They are not typical stakeholders so much as
influential stakeholders. How this is different from random
sampling is explained in a footnote (pg. 51) in which this
baffling statement is made: “Rather than seeking to
generalize, action research seeks solutions to problems and
questions that are quite context specific.” What is the
point of choosing representatives from stakeholder groups if you
do not assume that those persons represent the entire group and
isn’t that what we mean by generalization? There is
nothing particularly wrong with opportunity sampling as long as
we are aware of the possibilities of bias yet there is no
discussion of bias in this section on sampling.
The purpose of the interview is for the interviewees, i.e. the
influential stakeholders, to both “describe their own
situation in their own words” and to have the interviewer
“symbolically recognize the legitimacy of their (the
interviewees) point of view” (pg. 64). The first part of
the purpose is not exactly true. While the interviewer may
indeed get people to talk, what gets reported ultimately is
interpreted, first by the interviewee in what is called a
“double hermeneutic” and later by the researcher by a
process of analysis (chapter five). The second part of the
purpose seems a political and patronizing air about it. Do
influential stakeholders really need to have a researcher
legitimate their views? Or is this a way to mold the opinion of
the non-influential?
Stringer does have some useful structures for fashioning the
interview and later some useful structures for analyzing the
interview. The pieces around which the analysis is made are
called “epiphanies” and these are selected, analyzed,
and deconstructed by the researcher. By deconstructing he means
deciding for the interviewee the significance of an event and its
significant features (pg. 105). This is a lot of power placed in
the hands of the researcher. Presumably the researcher has the
competence to deserve it, but there is little discussion in the
text as to the strength and weaknesses of the particular
structures Stringer advocates in making the selections, analyses,
and deconstructions. We are then told that “The type of
analysis presented herein makes no distinction between analysis
and interpretation …”(pg. 112). There is a great
deal of difference between interpretation and analysis even at
the level of understanding local context.
Like any good qualitative researcher, Stringer urges the use
of other data points to bring added confidence to what is found
in the interview. His sections on the use of focus groups,
observations, documents and records have some good guidelines for
carrying those techniques out. However, the use of focus groups
also has an air of cooptation. “Individual interviews
followed by focus group exploration provide a context for
participants to share information and extend their understanding
of issues (pg. 76).” One wonders what happens when the
interpretation of an individual’s experience gets changed
in some way during the focus group. Presumably it is the
researcher’s job to make sense of that. In the discussion
on observation, we are told that in action research it is much
more open-ended than in experimental research. That is true in
some, or even many cases, but the determination of how structured
an observation is should be made in the light of the purpose of
the observation not whether it fits within one
“paradigm” or another. No observation is wholly
without structure.
Summary
What Stringer’s book on action research is about is the
use of ethnomethodology to describe the critical aspects of a
particular school in order to bring about some sort of change.
The book is not so much a radical break with the science that it
is meant to criticize as it is an application of a social science
to an educational setting. It has some strong points to
recommend it under that description. However, as a book that
might be useful to teachers who are trying to improve their
practice; who might be taking advanced work at a university to
become better practitioners; who might be part of a concerted
effort to improve the educational efficacy in a particular
school, it has severe limitations. The major limitation of the
book is that there is no structural connection between the
inquiry and the practice. What is strong is the procedural means
to develop a committed and energized group ready to act in some
way. What is weak is its failure to come to grips with how
judgments about just what to do are warranted. Making warranted
statements is, of course, what science has always been about.
Late twentieth century developments have questioned the warrants
of the positivists and have even raised the question of the
possibility of any warrants at all. Yet teachers are
practitioners and they work in social organizations and they must
justify their practice to even larger social organizations. How
they can come to interpret their own experiences and test the
consequences of their interpretations and then be able to present
those consequences in such a way that those social organizations
find them warranted is what inquiry is all about.
References
Greenwood, D. J. and Levin, M.L. (1998). Introduction to
action research: Social research for social change. Thousand
Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Kaplan, A. (1964). The conduct of inquiry: Methodology for
behavioral science. Scranton, PA: Chandler Publishing
Company.
Lincoln, Y. S. and Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic
inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
Mills, G. E. (2003). Action research: A guide for the
teacher researher (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Merrill Prentice Hall.
Phillips, D. C. and Burbules, N.C. (2000).
Postpositivismand educational research. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
About the Reviewer
Eugene Bartoo is a professor of education at the University of
Chattanooga with teaching specialties in curriculum planning and
educational inquiry. He has consulted widely with schools on
curriculum planning issues, evaluation issues, and teacher in-service
education. He
currently directs the alternative certification program, teaches in
the master's degree program, chairs the graduate council of the
university, and works with several off-campus action research
projects initiated by teachers. He is writing a book on educational
inquiry.
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