Twenty-fourth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

A practice research was undertaken to examine how researchers, practitioners, and service users work together to co-construct alternative practices in family service organizations in Hong Kong. With the collaboration of 10 social service organizations providing family service and parent education in Hong Kong, this mixed-methods study included a non-randomized controlled trial of a capacity-building program initiated by the researchers, individual interviews with eight practitioners, participant observations of four parent groups organized by practitioners, evaluation surveys, and eight focus groups with parents. The synthesis of both quantitative and qualitative findings indicates that practitioners tended to hold positive attitudes towards alternative approaches to parent education but also encountered various difficulties and challenges in actualization. This may be due to the insufficiency of relational and community resources available to practitioners to empower parents in the local context. Moreover, the findings demonstrate how an egalitarian working relationship between the researchers and practitioners and the active roles played by practitioners in the design and implementation of parent groups facilitated the co-creation of practitioners’ and researchers’ identities as collaborators. All these helped practitioners generate knowledge from their own reflections and experiences, seek changes in their modes of practice, and construct alternative discourses that focus on parents’ meaning-making, experiential knowledge, and mutual support via service users’ participation in the parent groups. A deep analysis of these findings can give directions for practitioners and researchers to reconceptualize parent education as co-construction, reflexive, and empowerment practices, as well as to reconsider the directions of organizational learning in family service.