Professor Sarah Banks s.j.banks@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Pathways to co-impact: action research and community organising
Banks, Sarah; Herrington, Tracey; Carter, Kathleen
Authors
Tracey Herrington
Kathleen Carter
Abstract
This article introduces the concept of ‘co-impact’ to characterise the complex and dynamic process of social and economic change generated by participatory action research (PAR). It argues that dominant models of research impact tend to see it as a linear process, based on a donor-recipient model, occurring at the end of a project following the take-up and use of findings. PAR challenges this approach, as impact is embedded in cycles of the action research process; the distinction between researchers, research informants and research users is blurred; and micro process-based impacts, including changes in the thinking and practices of co-researchers, are as significant as findings-based changes in policy and practice. A conceptual framework is developed, based on a three-fold distinction between ‘participatory’, ‘collaborative’ and ‘collective’ impact. This is applied to a case study action research project, Debt on Teesside, working with low-income households in North-east England. The project is analysed in terms of participatory impact (e.g. developing skills of participating households, mentor-researchers, and university staff); collaborative impact (e.g. findings-based changes in thinking, policies and practices of advice, community finance and housing agencies, and local authorities resulting from collaborative research); and ‘collective impact’, adapted from the field of social interventions, which involves organisations collectively targeting specific actions based on research (e.g. changing policy and practices of lenders and government relating to high-cost loans).
Citation
Banks, S., Herrington, T., & Carter, K. (2017). Pathways to co-impact: action research and community organising. Educational Action Research, 25(4), 541-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2017.1331859
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | May 14, 2017 |
Online Publication Date | Jun 15, 2017 |
Publication Date | Aug 8, 2017 |
Deposit Date | Jun 2, 2017 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 28, 2024 |
Journal | Educational Action Research |
Print ISSN | 0965-0792 |
Electronic ISSN | 1747-5074 |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis Group |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 25 |
Issue | 4 |
Pages | 541-559 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2017.1331859 |
Files
Accepted Journal Article
(331 Kb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Published Journal Article (Advance online version)
(1.4 Mb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Advance online version
Published Journal Article (Final published version)
(1.4 Mb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Final published version
You might also like
Law Versus Morality: Cases and Commentaries on Ethical Issues in Social Work Practice
(2022)
Journal Article
Pandemic ethics: Rethinking rights, responsibilities and roles in social work
(2021)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search