PELOPOR ACTION RESEARCH

The Origins of Action Research
Action research originates primarily in the work of Kurt Lewin and his colleagues
and associates (Coghlan and Brannick, 2003). In the mid-1940s, Lewin
and his associates conducted action research projects in different social settings.

Kurt Zadek Lewin (September 9, 1890 - February 12, 1947), a German-born psychologist, is one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology. Lewin is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first researchers to study group dynamics and organizational development.

In 1890, he was born into a Jewish family in Mogilno, Poland (then in County of Mogilno, province of Posen, Prussia). He served in the German army when World War I began. Due to a war wound, he returned to the University of Berlin to complete his Ph.D., with Carl Stumpf (1848 - 1936) the supervisor of his doctoral thesis. He died in Newtonville, Massachusetts of a heart-attack in 1947. He was buried in his home town.

Lewin had originally been involved with schools of behavioral psychology before changing directions in research and undertaking work with psychologists of the Gestalt school of psychology, including Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler. Lewin often associated with the early Frankfurt School, originated by an influential group of largely Jewish Marxists at the Institute for Social Research in Germany. But when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 the Institute members had to disband, moving to England and then to America. In that year, he met with Eric Trist, of the London Tavistock Clinic. Trist was impressed with his theories and went on to use them in his studies on soldiers during the Second World War.

Main article: Action research
Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term “action research” in about 1944, and it appears in his 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems”.[4] In that paper, he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action”.