Introduction: Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity is an issue in research because the issues and problems which drive scientific inquiry are themselves complex and multidimensional ‹and certainly no respecters of disciplinary boundaries. Yet, often research projects are designed from only one point of view. So a study with relevance and currency in multiple fields may be undertaken without benefit of, or even awareness of, understandings of the subject from more than one disciplinary perspective.

The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential lists six descriptions of interdisciplinarity; I like the simplest one best:

Interaction among two or more different disciplines. The interaction may range from communication and comparison of ideas to the mutual integration of organizing concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data and organization of research and education in a fairly large field. (An interdisciplinary group consists of persons trained in different fields of knowledge or disciplines with different concepts, methods, data and terms, organized into a common effort on a common problem with sustained intercommunication among the participants from the different disciplines).

As one means of addressing research myopia, this tutorial offers a general framework for a participatory process to create an interdisciplinary knowledge synthesis. It first entails identifying the concepts of interest and scoping out the fields of knowledge and experience most pertinent to the subject, as well as seeking patterns and gaps in existing information. While this process is itself an investigation, the procedure is intended to be undertaken prior to the design of a research project. Research designs informed by the knowledge synthesis created by an interdisciplinary team better reflect the complex nature of our physical and social world.