Research Gap Analysis

Besides addressing these delicate matters, the participatory action researcher engages in a study that facilitates ideals of egalitarian and democratic purposes. Participatory action researchers desire to have an open and inclusive manner for participants to be involved in their studies by making decisions as consensual partners, while fully engaging participants as relative equals to ensure their welfare. For example, in their inquiries, they will consider establishing contacts, identifying stakeholder groups, identifying key people, negotiating the researcher’s role, and forming a first picture of the field context of the study (Stringer, 2007). Also influential are the social values of liberation and life-enhancing transformations, and action researchers are interested in spearheading a new envisioning for schools, community agencies, youth clubs, and ethnic groups of schools. Lastly, Kemmis and McTaggart (2005) summarised six characteristics of PAR:

• PAR is a social activity in which the researcher actively investigates the relationship between the individual and others in the environment, to create an understanding of how social interaction values and revalues individual humans. In education, for example, participatory action researchers may investigate teachers working collaboratively in teams.
• This type of inquiry is participatory. That is, individuals investigate and with themselves. In the process, individuals explore how their own understandings, skills, values, and situated knowledge not only delimit but coordinate variables and structure their actions. For example, teachers would create participatory action research in and about their own practices, and that knowledge would shape (and delimit and structure) the work of teaching and learning with students.
• This aspect of inquiry is practical and collaborative. It is cooperative because it is an inquiry done with others. It is sensible because researchers are typically examining acts of communication, the production of knowledge, and the organisation of social structure to decrease irrational, unproductive, unjust, or unfulfilling experiences. For example, teachers may engage in PAR, together with other researchers, to decrease levels of bureaucracy within a school that restrains classroom innovations.
• Participatory action research (PAR) is liberatory because it allows people to free themselves of irrational and inequitable systems that inhibit self-development and self-determination. For example, the purpose of a study may be to address the bureaucratic policies and procedures that inhibit teachers’ ability to facilitate student learning in schools.
• PAR is critical because it will seek to alleviate and help people free themselves from the constraints that are built into social constructs (e.g., language, work habits, social relationships of power). For example, teachers may feel constrained by a subordinate role that their school district has placed upon them, so they do not feel empowered in their classrooms.
• PAR is reflexive (e.g., recursive or dialectical) and it is focused on changing practices through spirals of reflection and action. Teachers may reflect on their practice roles in schools and attempt one action and then another. Each time, they will return to the focused questions of what they learned and accomplished from their actions.