Service Improvement · Community Development · Third Sector · Public Health
Action Research: Understanding and Changing, Not Just Reporting
Conventional research produces findings. Action research produces change. The difference is that action research treats implementation as part of the inquiry: communities and practitioners identify the problem, shape the investigation, and are active agents in acting on what it reveals. Research and improvement are the same process, not sequential ones.
What action research is, and why it matters
Most commissioned research follows a linear model: researchers study a situation, produce a report, and hand it to an organisation that may or may not act on it. The research and the change are separate activities, often separated by months and by the gap between what researchers understood and what practitioners need to know to act.
Action research collapses that gap. The inquiry is conducted within the system being improved, by people who are part of it: practitioners, service users, and community members alongside researchers. Findings are used iteratively as they emerge. The research cycle produces change, not just a report about the possibility of change.
Participatory action research (PAR) extends this by making affected communities co-investigators, sharing ownership of the inquiry, not just contributing to it. This is one approach within the broader participatory research tradition. See also our overview: What is participatory research?
Action research and participatory action research
The distinction between the two approaches, and when each is the right fit
Action research
Action research is conducted within a system, by researchers who are active participants in it, or by practitioners who are using research methods to understand and improve their own practice. It is iterative: each cycle of inquiry informs the next round of action. Findings are not held back until the end of the project; they are used as they emerge.
Action research is used in NHS quality improvement programmes, organisational development, educational practice, and anywhere that practitioner knowledge is essential to understanding the problem. It works well when the research question is defined by people inside the system, not imposed from outside it.
Participatory action research (PAR)
PAR extends the action research model by adding community co-ownership of the entire inquiry. Affected communities (service users, residents, patients, community members) are co-investigators who help define the problem, choose the methods, collect data, interpret findings, and decide how the research informs action.
PAR is the right approach when the problem being studied is one that communities experience directly, and when their insider knowledge is essential to defining it accurately. It overlaps with CBPR and co-production research, and is often used alongside lived experience methods.
Where action research is used
Contexts where conventional research cycles are too slow, and where practitioners and communities hold the knowledge needed to improve
NHS Service Improvement
NHS quality improvement programmes frequently use action research frameworks: practitioners study their own services, test changes, and iterate based on what they find. PAR extends this by bringing patient and service user experience into the improvement cycle as co-investigated evidence, not just feedback collected after decisions have been made.
Third Sector Programme Evaluation
Charities and social enterprises evaluating their own programmes can use participatory action research to involve the communities they serve in generating evidence of impact. This produces evaluation findings that funders find more credible, and identifies programme improvements during the evaluation, not just after it.
Community Development
PAR has deep roots in community development, where the goal is not just to understand a community's situation but to strengthen the community's capacity to change it. Peer researchers develop skills, community members gain insight into their own situation, and the research process builds the relationships and capabilities that sustain improvement after the project ends.
Public Health and Prevention
Public health programmes addressing health inequalities, chronic disease prevention, or community wellbeing often need to understand barriers to behaviour change and service engagement from the inside. PAR generates that understanding whilst simultaneously building community agency, so the research contributes to the change it is studying.
Organisational and Practice Development
Organisations looking to understand and improve their own practices (staff experience, working culture, service delivery) can use action research to involve practitioners in diagnosing problems and testing solutions. The knowledge is already in the organisation; action research makes it available and usable.
Policy and Systems Change
Action research is used at the systems level where multiple organisations and communities need to work together to understand and change a complex situation: integrated care, housing, employment support, social care. PAR brings the communities affected by the system into the process of understanding what the system is actually doing to them.
How we support action research
Structured support for the full action research cycle: from problem definition to implementation and evaluation
Problem definition with practitioners and communities
We work with you and your community partners to define the problem from the inside: what practitioners observe, what service users experience, what the evidence already suggests. This sets the inquiry up around the real question rather than the assumed one.
Research design and cycle planning
We design the action research cycle (the sequence of inquiry, action, and reflection) appropriate to your timescale and context. For PAR, community members are involved in this design stage as co-investigators, not as consultees reviewing a protocol.
Facilitated inquiry and data collection
Workshops, community sessions, practitioner reflections, interviews, and observation, whichever methods best surface the knowledge distributed across practitioners and communities. We facilitate rather than extract: our role is to create the conditions for insight to emerge and be shared.
Iterative analysis and feedback
Findings are fed back into the system as they emerge, not held for a final report. Each cycle of inquiry informs the next round of action and the next round of inquiry. Community members and practitioners participate in sense-making throughout.
Implementation support
We support the translation of research findings into action, working with you and community partners to identify what changes are indicated, what is feasible, and what evidence you need to demonstrate the improvement has happened.
Reporting and documentation
Documentation of the action research process for governance, funder reporting, or academic contribution. Accessible summaries for community participants alongside full reports for commissioning organisations.
Common questions about action research
What is the difference between action research and participatory action research?
Action research involves researchers working within a system alongside practitioners to understand and improve it iteratively. PAR extends this by making affected communities co-investigators, involved in defining the problem, shaping the inquiry, and acting on findings, not just providing data. All PAR is action research; not all action research is participatory in the full PAR sense.
How does action research relate to CBPR and co-production?
PAR, CBPR, and co-production research all involve community partnership in generating knowledge: they overlap significantly in principle and often in practice. The main distinction is emphasis: PAR emphasises the change orientation and the iterative research-action cycle; CBPR emphasises the depth of community co-investigation; co-production emphasises equal power-sharing. In practice, many studies draw on all three traditions.
Can action research satisfy NIHR involvement requirements?
Yes. A PAR approach, where community members are co-investigators involved in defining questions, collecting data, and interpreting findings, provides robust, documented evidence of genuine involvement. The iterative, community-owned nature of PAR often represents a stronger form of PPI than many standard involvement approaches.
What is the relationship between action research and quality improvement?
NHS quality improvement frameworks (PDSA cycles, plan-do-study-act) are essentially action research methodologies: iterative cycles of inquiry and change. PAR extends the QI model by bringing patient and community experience into the improvement cycle as co-investigated evidence, not just as outcome measures or patient satisfaction data collected after the fact.
What is action research?
Action research is a form of inquiry conducted with the explicit aim of creating change. Unlike conventional research, which produces findings that others may or may not act upon, action research treats change as a core goal of the research process itself. Researchers are not detached observers; they are active participants in the system being studied, working alongside practitioners and communities to understand problems and implement solutions iteratively.
What is participatory action research (PAR)?
Participatory action research (PAR) adds community co-ownership to the action research model. Affected communities are not just the setting for the research; they are its co-investigators. They help identify the problem, shape the inquiry, collect data, interpret findings, and are active agents in implementing what the research reveals. PAR is widely used in community development, NHS service improvement, public health, and third sector programme evaluation.
When is action research the right approach?
Action research is the right approach when: you need to understand a problem and implement a solution within the same programme; when the knowledge needed to solve the problem is distributed across practitioners and communities rather than held by researchers; when conventional research timescales are too slow for the improvement cycle you are running; and when the credibility of findings depends on them being generated by the people closest to the issue, not extracted by outside researchers.
How much does action research cost?
Action research starts from £9,500 for a single cycle, from £19,000 for a programme running several cycles, and from £36,000 for extended multi-site work. Facilitation, analysis between cycles and fair payment for participants are included. Because action research is iterative, we scope it a cycle at a time: you see what the first one changes before committing to the next. Build a rough estimate or tell us what you are trying to change.
We fully recognise the effort your team invested in recruitment, moderation, and analysis, and we genuinely appreciate the quality of the discussions and reporting.
- Usability problems in an insulin device surfaced before manufacturing locked anything in, with human factors evidence supporting the regulatory submission.
- An NHS patient portal team got a prioritised, evidenced list of adoption barriers, and the highest-leverage fix wasn't the one they expected.
- Patient involvement changed a trial's primary endpoint before the protocol was finalised, cited by the ethics committee as a model for evidencing PPIE.
Trusted PPI and PPIE delivery partner to the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Accelerated Surgical Care.
Want to build change into the research itself?
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