There are many books devoted to developing rationales and outlines for qualitative, participatory, feminist, and action research. I have included several of those works in the bibliography at the end of this book. What I would like to do here is outline the way in which we talked about action and feminist research at the beginning of the project, outline the experiential learning model that provided a framework for the work, review the research validity practices and ethics considerations, and present some of the theory that underlies this research approach.

Most women who became involved in this research had little, if any, research background. Some had completed academic research in high school, college, or university. Some had developed funding proposals and evaluations for particular projects. We could not, however, assume that those coming to the first national workshop would feel comfortable proceeding with program-based action research without some background information and tools. I wanted to explain the research design as straightforwardly as possible and to suggest that research is a distinct and definable activity. Decades of research theory and practice gave us a foundation for building our own particular project.

Action research

I use the definition of research developed by the Women's Research Centre based in Vancouver:

Research is the systematic collection and analysis of information on a particular topic. (Barnsley & Ellis, 1992, p. 9)

Both aspects of this definition - the systematic collection of information and the analysis of that information - are central. Because the collection of information is systematic, it must be focused, planned, and documented. For that to happen, we need to be clear about the questions we are asking. We need to work out what kind of information we want to collect and then develop a strategy to collect it.