Ravalier PhD Theis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

65
secondary and primary workplace stress interventions. Both of these
approaches experience stress as the result of problems within the
individual, e.g. secondary approaches often see the problem as the
individual being unable to cope with the working environment and
therefore seek to enhance individual’s ability to deal with stress, and
tertiary interventions look retrospectively at the problem once the
employee has experienced a strain reaction. However, primary
approaches follow the lead as set by the transactional and JDCS models,
looking at changing the working environment as opposed to the
individual, and thus removing the sense of blame from the individual.
1f) Participatory Workplace Research
As analysed above in Section 1e.1, primary intervention studies
make attempts at changing the organisational environment and thus
lessening stressors at the source from which they emanate. In conducting
these primary prevention studies increasing numbers of researchers are
employing participatory change processes (Trudel et al., 2009; see
Chapter IV, Section 2 for an exploration on organisational change).
Participatory approaches to organisational research create the
knowledge required in order to design and implement action (Cornwall &
Jewkes, 1995). Participatory research therefore allows individuals to
discover their own solutions to problems that they may encounter - they
encourage a 'bottom-up' approach which leads to 'local' perspectives
toward and knowledge of work phenomena. In participative research the
main researcher who elicits a research program is committed to sharing
power with those who are taking part, and thus ensuring that the research
is conducted both for the outcomes of participants and researchers (Diaz
& Simmons, 1999). Northway (2010) argues that participatory research is
neither a research design nor a methodology, and both quantitative as
well as qualitative methodologies (see Chapter VI, Section 1a) can be
used in order to fully appreciate the use of a participative approach.
Participatory research differs from 'conventional' researchers in a
number of ways. In more traditional research projects it is the researcher