Assembling a Cabinet of Curiousities: Using Participatory Action Research and Constructivist Grounded Theory to Generate Stronger Theorization of Public Sector Innovation Labs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes how a critical qualitative bricolage of research methods, with participatory action research and constructivist grounded theory at the center, were assembled and applied to support stronger theorization of the work of public sector innovation labs while remaining strongly grounded in the experiences and intelligence of practitioners. We begin by sharing the context for this research, including describing what PSI labs are, the purpose for this research, and an overview of the process and participants. Next, the framing for this approach is described, detailing the metaphor of assembling a cabinet of curiosities. This cabinet contains five main methods and approaches including: critical research bricolage; sensitizing concepts; participatory action research; constructivist grounded theory; and weaving the assemblage together. We conclude by discussing the four key methodological insights generated , the contribution that this work makes to the literature about participatory research methods, and how researchers with a transformative intent can use this in practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.067 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".