BE: A Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The Hybrid Vigor Institute, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

Numerous factors have driven the desire to promote more interdisciplinary research in the environmental sciences, including the desire to better understand the complex interactions among the many different natural and human systems that characterize the world and the need to better integrate the efforts of those researchers seeking to answer fundamental questions about various systems with those interesting advancing methods and techniques for the conduct of scientific research. Despite the acclaim accorded interdisciplinary research, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to dynamics that result in effective work that spans disciplinary boundaries. This project will use a multi-level, multi-method approach to study interdisciplinary collaboration as it relates to scientific production and innovation. The investigators will combine a socio-anthropological approach with an organizational perspective to examine how interdisciplinary collaboration transpires as well as when and how it leads to scientific production and innovation. This project will be a pilot study designed to test the effectiveness and tractability of a range of approaches on a sample of interdisciplinary centers that focus on environmental research and education and that have received NSF research support. The pilot will emphasize two strands if research. The first strand will focus on interdisciplinary research network structure. It will use techniques of social network analysis to explore structural relations among individuals in eight sample centers. Data used in this part of the pilot will be drawn from a variety of sources, including surveys of individual researchers, a census of ties among individuals within centers, and bibliometric analyses of citations in curriculum vitae. The second strand will focus on interdisciplinary research network dynamics. This strand will focus on interaction and organizational analyses of knowledge transfer, conversion, and integration. Special attention will be given to the connectedness, centrality, and roles and positions of different researchers and disciplines in the networks of two sample centers. Data will be gathered through the conduct of interviews, the review of artifacts and documents, and the observation of activities in the centers. The results of these activities will be used to generate white papers, to make presentations as major meetings of groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Sociological Association, and to submit papers to scholarly journals like Social Studies of Science, Science Communication, Human Communication Research, Social Epistemology, and Organization Science. Through these analyses, the investigators expect to provide new insights into the personal, organizational, psychological, and intellectual components of the research environments and interactions within centers, and they expect to distinguish between factors that characterize successful interdisciplinary collaborations. This project will advance general knowledge of the factors that lead to successful interdisciplinary research, thereby facilitating such work among members of the myriad research communities who now are exploring collaborative work with each other. The project also should assist NSF and other funding agencies in assessing which proposed projects are most likely to generate new insights that span traditional disciplinary boundaries. This project is being supported with funds designated by NSF for the support of projects in Biocomplexity in the Environment.