Action-Oriented Research: A Primer and Examples (Report‪)‬

Action-oriented research is defined as generating knowledge through applied collaborative university-community interventions that can simultaneously contribute to local communities and add to general knowledge. Few examples currently exist in the Christian integration literature. We present a conceptual article encouraging Christians who integrate their practice, research, and Christianity to undertake more of this difficult and costly, yet important research. Some benefits and difficulties in conducting action-oriented research are described with specific research examples. As a case study, we briefly report a failed initial effort, and then report a successful research example in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention-sponsored Multisite Violence Prevention Program (MVPP). We conclude that the imperfect case study can reveal lessons for researchers and community agencies that could make future action-oriented research of higher quality. We encourage researchers and practitioners to collaborate on action-oriented research to eventually lead to high quality research like the MVPP. This research was funded by a sub-award (Grant 2003-011) to the first author from the Center for the Study and Prevention of Youth Violence under its Center grant from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (grant #15460001758a1). We gratefully acknowledge the financial support and other encouragement. Some of the writing of this article was completed while the first author was a Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Psychology and Christianity, Fraser Watts and John Polkinghorne, Directors, and we thank Virginia Commonwealth University for financial support during that period. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial and collegial support of the Centre. Revision of the article was partially funded on grant # 2266 from the Ferzer Institute. Please send correspondence regarding the article to Everett l. Worthington, Jr., Ph.D., 806 West Franklin Street (Mailing) 800 West Franklin Street, Room 101 (Office, do not use for mailing) Richmond, VA 23284-2018.