Making Rigorous Research Relevant: Innovating Statistical Action Research

Using Academic Search Complete, we sought out any published action research articles taking positivist and/or statistical approaches in the information systems discipline. We searched articles in the Senior Scholars Basket of 8 (MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems) and three additional prominent journals (Information & Organization, Information & Management, and Decision Support Systems). In these journals, for published articles mentioning “action research” in the title, abstract, or keywords, we specified a search for those articles that included any of the following words or word stems: “sample size,” “statistical* significan*,” “positivis*,” “null hypothesis,” “regression,” “ANOVA,” “MANCOVA,” “structural equation model*,” “SEM.” Of the 24 articles that the search produced, an examination of each one revealed that the given article may have mentioned one of more of the selected words or word stems (such as “positivis*”), but could not be considered to be positivist (whether quantitative or qualitative) and did not conduct any statistical hypothesis testing.