RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Older people in digital creation contexts: building a participatory action research design 55
as an inside-out research that builds on “action as a legitimate mode of knowing, thereby taking
the realm of knowledge into the field of practice” (Tandon, 1996, p. 21, cited in McIntyre,
2008, xii).
Although in the action-research literature there is a high consistency in defining PAR as
a context-specific “process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of
worthwhile human purposes” (Reason & Bradbury, 2001, p. 1) and social change, we argue
that, depending on the primacy of a component over the others, de facto, we are faced with
distinct versions of the same research approach.
This comes in line with the broader categories of approaches identified in the literature
on action research (Whitelaw, Beattie, Balogh & Watson, 2003, p. 166): technical action
research, favoring a rather positivist research approach; practical or mutual-collaboration
action research, placed within a more interpretivist framework and stressing the collaborative
nature of the research; and the critical, emancipatory action research, focused on the
empowerment of “ordinary”/marginalized people and, hence, on the performative, social
change orientation of the research process.
Moreover, it is supported by the wide spectrum of fields and corollary designs that lay
under the PAR umbrella term (Kindon, Pain & Kesby, 2007): education and critical pedagogy,
feminist studies, environmental studies, health studies, community-based research, organizational
studies etc. Generally speaking, PAR is a research approach in which people (e.g.,
residents, community organizers, youth, practitioners or other stakeholders) give voice to and
collaboratively address community problems (Abo-Zena & Pavalow, 2016), such as gentrification,
street harassment, unemployment, pollution, access to health care, illiteracy etc.
Nevertheless, despite this high consistency in addressing the benefits of PAR and defining
its main characteristics as research approach, we argue that the literature tends to focus
less on the way social learning emerges on both the individual and collective levels and more
on the end-goal of the research process and the actual social action/ change that are grounded
in the outputs of the research process.
Participatory Action Research in the area of
technology creation and appropriation
Different types of PAR could be found in the area of ICT when we talk about user friendly
designing of applications to fit customers’ needs and daily habits. Most of the time, such
approaches are employed by Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) domain and are used for
prototype designing and testing, concerning for the final product/application appropriation
and use. Therefore, the approach is defined as Participatory Action Design (PAD), as a model
of involving users in co-creation of the designing product, alongside of the entire process (Ding,
Cooper & Pearlman 2007).
The Research and Development (R&D) areas are using PAD by involving end-users in
different stages of the process: establishing research agenda, formulating the research questions,
involving participants as research assistants or advisors, involving participants in testing
prototypes or ideas and in the evaluation process – as for example continuation in use,
advantages and disadvantages of the implemented ideas (Wu, Richards & Baecker, 2004).
Since the first use of PAD models in 1970, when they assisted the implementation of computers
in work environments, the approach has been successfully extended to other areas too,