Action Research as a Bridge Between Two Worlds: Helping The NGOs and Humanitarian Agencies Adapt Technology to Their Needs

Abstract

This paper reflects upon the process of introducing social media systems into supported employment programs for peoples with severe mental illness in Taipei. Such intervention represents the encounter of two different worlds that are often-unknown to each other, i.e. IT student engineers and job coaches in NGOs. With the participatory and cyclic feature of action research approach, the process can be divided into three stages: technology-led stage, mutual infusion stage, and service-led stage. The focus of this research is to illustrate how action research provides a site for the infusion of two different horizons, that is technology experts in academia and social service providers in NGOs. The existing problems in the use of IT within NGOs were studied and changes through coinquiry and interventions were implemented towards better utilization of IT and higher levels of service qualities. The researchers utilized an action research approach to investigate the problems, plan the actions, intervene, assess the effectiveness resulting from the actions, and specify learning outcomes.

Using collaborative research methodologies in humanitarian supply chains

“…To enable the creation of practically relevant and theoretically based knowledge, frameworks and models, research in humanitarian settings would benefit from a proactive approach of academia-practitioner collaboration to research across university, institutional and organisational boundaries (Bartell et al, 2006;Prasad et al, 2017). As such, collaborative research methodologies with their participatory focus bridge two worlds, academic concepts and practitioners operating models (Chang et al, 2010), and create contextually relevant knowledge (Sohn, 2018). Therefore, Engaged scholarship as "[…] a collaborative form of inquiry in which academics and practitioners leverage their different perspectives and competencies to coproduce knowledge about a complex problem or phenomenon that exists under conditions of uncertainty found in the world" (Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006, p. 803) appears to be a very relevant research methodology for humanitarian supply chain research.…”

Student Engineers as Agents of Change: Combining Social Inclusion in the Professional Development of Electrical and Computer Engineering Students

“…However, insiders and outsiders live in two worlds (Chang et al 2010). Action researchers orientate themselves to a new situation, learn about it and prepare to deal with it.…”

“…The contribution of this paper combines social inclusion as a curriculum design emphasizing action research methods of teaching, learning and conducting research that transform academic classroom curricula into meaningful services in community-based settings (Chou et al 2008;Chang et al 2010). In a service-learning curriculum at the senior level in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), we practice the action research methodology to improve students' involvement in the social context.…”

Convening green to humanitarian logistics scene: a collaborative research approach for embedding environmental sustainability in humanitarian logistics

“…The application of collaborative research in HSC has been very limited but growing. Prominent examples are Sabri (2018), Sabri et al (2019), Khoury (2019), Zarei et al (2019c), Wagner and Thakur-Weigold (2018), Chang et al (2010). Different terms are used to refer to the specific collaborative methodology applied, such as action research, design science, participant observation, engaged scholarship.…”

“…They have developed a framework for action research in HSC which illustrates the phases of application, responsibilities of researchers and practitioners, and quality assessment criteria. Action research has been applied to address critical issues such as adopting and adapting technology for humanitarian organizations (Chang et al, 2010), designing global tools for humanitarian logistics (Jahre et al, 2015), involving people with disabilities in humanitarian research (Tanabe et al, 2018), improving the efficiency of humanitarian logistics (Manikas et al, 2017), collaboration in HSCs (Wagner and Thakur-Weigold, 2018), providing healthcare to rural areas (Prasad et al, 2018), and performance measurement of HSCs (Abidi et al, 2020). The track of publication in leading journals suggests that, despite being at early stages of maturity, application of action research to supply chain and operations management in general, and HSCs in specific is burgeoning.…”