Page 124 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

improvement and change within the context. It must solve a practical problem and generate knowledge” (Dickens & Watkins, 1999, p.191).
The goal of the involvement is the other essential direction of AR. Practitioners in the own environment are best equipped to cooperate and to be able to contribute in the development of hypotheses, since they are grounded and are aware of all subtle characteristics and influences that may hamper the plan’s implementation. As addition, practitioners are encouraged to embrace psychological ownership of problematic situations. They can be instrumental for efficient data collection and give direction to methods for follow up development (Lippitt & Nadler, 1979).
As co-owners of the problem, action researchers are entitled to acquire necessary skills for solving the problems and implementing the continuous learning. The still existing concern about the division between practitioners and theorists can be observed in the interdependence of involvement and improvement. AR is in the position to establish strong connections with knowledge directed to learning, acquirement of personal knowledge and the drive for prolonged strategic action (Brown et al., 1982). The final outcome of this study will present conclusions and recommendations, to be able to improve future approaches and organisational processes.
The research conducted for the underlying study has been carried out in the professional expert model of AR and has been “based on the premise, that a professional researcher (or researchers) contract an organisation (or organisations) to study a situation and a set of problems, to determine what the facts are, and to recommend a course of action” (Whyte, 1991, p.9). Such research process is usually led by professional experts. Practitioners, involved in pilot interviews and in focus group meetings were consulted on the direction of the study and asked for their contribution by providing situational information. From the perspective of the differentiation, proposed by McTaggart (1991), the research carried out for the underlying study, will follow the direction of expert driven AR and will partially neglect the (full) variant of participatory AR.
3.2.4 Validity criteria in Action Research
Herr and Anderson (2005 p. 55) proposed the following approach regarding the validity issue of AR “Compared with the rigid “positivist” stance on Validity, the claim for validity in the AR framework is less strong and spread over sub-criteria”. In AR five sub-divisions of validity are recognized (Table 3).
Table 4: Goals of Action Research and Validity Criteria 122