Cooperative Inquiry

Co-operative inquiry | Validity procedures

Based within the participative paradigm, the co-operative inquiry method (Heron 1996, 1998; Reason 1988, 1994; Reason & Bradbury 2000) was developed as a research method for the investigation of human experience for two or more people.

The cooperative inquiry method is a form of research where participants are viewed as co-researchers who participate in decision making at all stages of the project. Cooperative inquiry involves two or more people researching their own experience of something in alternating cycles of reflection and action. Co-operative inquiry is traditionally a face-to-face collaborative method that allows for group synergies to develop. This method adds richness, depth and the likelihood of new knowledge emerging through the cyclic, reflective process of the inquiry. This cooperative method appears appropriate for facilitators to investigate their own practice in a collective way.

Heron (1996) considers that orthodox research methods are inadequate for a science of persons, because they undermine the self-determination of their ‘subjects’. He proposes that it is possible to conceive of a research approach where all those involved are self-directed, and in a position to contribute both to creative thinking and to the research and associated action. Co-operative inquiry was developed to provide such a framework for integrating both personal autonomy and group collaboration.

Cooperative inquiry rests on two participatory principles described above: epistemic participation and political participation. The first means that any propositional knowledge that is the outcome of the research is grounded by the researcher’s own experiential knowledge. The second means that research subjects have a basic human right to participate fully in designing the research that intends to gather knowledge about them. It follows from the first principle that the researchers are also the subjects; and from the second principle that the subjects are also the researchers. The co-researchers are also the co-subjects. The research is done by people with each other, not by researchers on other people or about them.

In mainline qualitative research, done within the aegis of constructivism, neither of these two principles applies. Such research, using multiple methodologies, is about other people studied in their own social setting and understood in terms of the meanings those people themselves bring to their situation (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 2). The researchers are not also subjects. They ground their propositional findings not on their own experiential knowing but on that of other people, the researched subjects, as reflected in the subjects' dialogue with the researchers. The researchers' own experiential knowing as occasional participant observations within the subjects' culture tend to be secondary and subordinate.

Top

Validity Procedures

Adapted from Heron, John 1996. Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the human condition. Sage: London

The purpose of these procedures is to free the various forms of knowing involved in the inquiry process from distortion (a lack of discriminating awareness).The following validity procedures need to be planned for, or applied, within the reflection phases.

Research cycling
If the research topic (and its parts) are taken through several cycles of reflection and action, then reflective forms of knowing progressively refine each other.

Divergence and convergence
Within the action phases co-inquirers can diverge and converge on the topic and its parts enabling all forms of knowing to articulate the research topic and its parts more thoroughly.

Reflection and action
Since reflection and experience refine each other, it is important to keep a balance between them, so that there is neither too much reflection on too little experience, nor too little reflection on too much experience.

Aspects of reflection
Create a balance between presentational (expressive or artistic) and propositional (verbal/ intellectual) ways of making sense. Within intellectual, create a balance between: describing, evaluating descriptions, building theory and planning application.

Challenging uncritical subjectivity
A procedure authorising any inquirer at any time to adopt formally the role of devil’s advocate in order to question the group as to whether uncritical subjectivity is occurring.

Chaos and order
Allowing for the interdependence of chaos and order, of nescience and knowing. It is an attitude which tolerates and undergoes, without premature closure, inquiry phases which are confused and disorientated, ambiguous and uncertain, conflicted and inharmonious, generally lost and groping. These phases tend in their own good time to convert into new levels of order. But since there is no guarantee to do so, they are risky and edgy.

Managing projections
If needed the group adopts some regular method for surfacing and processing repressed templates of past emotional trauma, which may project out, distorting thought, perception and action, within the inquiry.

Authentic collaboration
One aspect is that group members internalise the inquiry method and make it their own so that they become on a peer footing with the initiating researchers. The other is that each group member is fully and authentically given the opportunity to engage in each action phase and in each reflection; on a peer basis with every other group member.

Co-operative inquiry | Validity procedures