Towards a Checklist for Improving Action Research Quality in Healthcare Contexts

Published accounts of action research studies in healthcare frequently underreport the quality of the action research. These studies often lack the specificity and details needed to demonstrate the rationale for the selection of an action research approach and how the authors perceive the respective study to have met action research quality criteria. This lack contributes to a perception among academics, research funding agencies, clinicians and policy makers, that action research is ‘second class’ research. This article addresses the challenge of this perception by offering a bespoke checklist called a Quality Action Research Checklist (QuARC) for reporting action research studies and is based on a quality framework first published in this journal. This checklist, comprising four factors - context, quality of relationships, quality of the action research process itself and the dual outcomes, aims to encourage researchers to provide complete and transparent reporting and indirectly improve the rigor and quality of action research. In addition, the benefit of using a checklist and the challenges inherent in such application are also discussed.