Comments on systematic methodologies of action research in the new millennium: A review of publications 2000–2014

Abstract

Substantial attention has been given to action research. A systematic review was implemented in 2001 to provide a complete summary of existing action research studies, but there is no systematic exploration of action research publications for this millennium. The general objective of this study was to systematically retrieve and review empirical studies on action research methodologies from 2000 to 2014. The consecutive and structured process of searching, selecting and examining articles through the Matrix Method was elaborated clearly in this paper. This study has found a wide variety of action research paradigms, data collection, and analysis methods and this paper discussed action research quality from these three aspects. Actor-network theory was introduced to propose the Spectrum of action research paradigms. In addition, a new classification was presented to group all data collection methods into those conducted respectively by researchers, participants, and both. Six kinds of commonly used data analysis approaches were extracted. Limitations and conclusions of the study were articulated in this paper.