How can action research justify its conclusions when it provide give causal explanations?
It is true that action research does not usually try to provide causal explanations — explanations of causal relationships between limited numbers of variables. It shares a belief with some “systems” approaches: in some situations, causal explanations are either not possible, or too cumbersome to be very useful. When there are many variables, and they interact (often bi-directionally) in complex ways, causal explanations are themselves likely to be very complex. To put it differently, when almost everything has an effect on almost everything else, it may not be much practical help to know that “a” influences “b”. As discussed above, it is usually helpful to know that I can often achieve outcome Z by doing action X. In that sense, causal understanding actively pursued.
