UNDERSTANDING AND ASSESSING INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN HEALTH RESEARCH TEAMS

Background: Interdisciplinary research has been promoted as an optimal research paradigm in the health sciences, yet little is known about how researchers experience interdisciplinarity in practice. This study sought to determine how interdisciplinary research was conceptualized and operationalized from the researcher's perspective and to better understand how best to facilitate interdisciplinary research success. Methods: Key informant interviews were conducted with health researchers with expertise or experience in conducting interdisciplinary research. Interviews were completed either in person or over the telephone using a semi-structured interview guide. Data collection occurred simultaneously with data analysis so that emerging themes could be explored in subsequent interviews. A content analysis approach was used. Results: Nineteen researchers took part in this study. Interdisciplinary research was conceptualized disparately between participants, and there was modest attention towards operationalization of interdisciplinary research. There was one overriding theme, "It's all about relationships", that emerged from the data. Within this theme, there were four related subthemes: 1) Involvement in interdisciplinary research; 2) Why do I do interdisciplinary research? ; 3) Managing and fostering interdisciplinary relationships; and 4) The prickly side to interdisciplinary research. Together, these themes suggest that the choice to conduct interdisciplinary research, though often driven by the research question, is highly influenced by interpersonal and relationship-related factors. In addition, researchers preferred to engage in interdisciplinary research with those that they had already established relationships and where their role in the research process was clearly articulated. A focus on relationship building was seen as a strong facilitator of interdisciplinary success. Conclusion: Many health researchers experienced mixed reactions towards their involvement in interdisciplinary research. A well thought-out rationale for interdisciplinary research, and strategies to utilize the contribution of each researcher involved were seen as facilitators towards maximizing the benefits that could be derived from interdisciplinary research. Published: 23 May 2008 BMC Health Services Research 2008, 8:110 doi:10.1186/1472-6963-8-110 Received: 3 December 2007 Accepted: 23 May 2008 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral. com/1472-6963/8/110 © 2008 Nair et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Page 1 of 10 (page number not for citation purposes) BMC Health Services Research 2008, 8:110 http://www.biomedcentral. com/1472-6963/8/110 Background Interdisciplinarity in health research has become a common research paradigm. Globally, central research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, the Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) in the European Union, and organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) have all focused efforts towards increasing interdisciplinary research. In Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has been at the forefront of promoting interdisciplinarity within health research with many funding opportunities geared specifically towards the development of interdisciplinary teams [1]. This shift in how research is funded, along with changes in academia (e.g. joint appointments; interdisciplinary programs and faculties), has further reinforced the value placed by funders and academic institutions on the conduct of interdisciplinary research. Despite this emphasis on interdisciplinarity, relatively little has been documented about how researchers experience interdisciplinary health research in practice. Although interdisciplinarity is touted as a valuable aspect of health research, it is only recently that there have been attempts to define and operationalize it, with varying definitions in existence. Interdisciplinarity within health sciences research usually involves researchers from multiple disciplines working together to tackle complex, multifaceted research questions. In 2005, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences defined interdisciplinary research as "a team of researchers, solidly grounded in their respective disciplines, that come together around an important and challenging health issue, the research question for which is determined by a shared understanding in an interactive and iterative process" (p.764) [1]. A systematic review in 2007 saw interdisciplinary research explicated as: "any study or group of studies undertaken by scholars from two or more distinct scientific disciplines. The research is based upon a conceptual model that links or integrates theoretical frameworks from those disciplines, uses study design and methodology that is not limited to any one field, and requires the use of perspectives and skills of the involved disciplines throughout multiple phases of the research process" (p.341) [2]. Thus, the presence of at least two disciplines, a shared delineation of the research question, and involvement from each discipline throughout the research process have been noted as key elements of interdisciplinary research. Related types of research, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary share similar features. Multidisciplinary research typically involves disciplines working more independently on a research study, and transdisciplinary research purports to utilize the methods and perspective of various disciplines to generate new knowledge and approaches. Therefore, each type of research is characterized by different levels of involvement by researchers and has varying impacts on knowledge generation. It is interdisciplinary research, however, that has been the focus of much attention within the last few years regarding its definition. Scholars such as Julie Thompson Klein [3-5] have been writing about interdisciplinarity since the early 1990s, but it is only in the last five-to-ten years that there has been a marked increase in the nature and frequency of attention devoted to interdisciplinary research. A number of commentaries and articles have described some of the challenges of interdisciplinary research in health and science [1,6-9]. In Canada, government, industry, and academia have both supported and hindered the uptake of interdisciplinary health research [1]. For example, despite many funding initiatives focused on interdisciplinary health research, academic institutions are still primarily organized through disciplinary-based boundaries (and faculty rewarded for contribution to these disciplines), thereby thwarting incentives for moving beyond these boundaries. Others have also cited the tenure system as a major impediment to interdisciplinary research, and as a result some researchers may avoid opportunities for participation in interdisciplinary research [6,8,9]. The push for involvement in interdisciplinary research has left some researchers feeling compelled to undertake interdisciplinary research, concerned about becoming adisciplinary, and feeling frustrated with continually re-educating new disciplines about one's own discipline [8]. As well, within an international research milieu, context is important in shaping research questions and their findings, and there can be difficulties in navigating differences in terminology and culture [10]. These papers have been instrumental in laying the foundation for documenting the nature and realities of interdisciplinary research in health and science. The logical next step is an examination of the experience of researchers currently conducting interdisciplinary health research within academia. Accordingly, this study sought to determine how interdisciplinary research was conceptualized and experienced from the academic health researcher's perspective and to understand how to foster success in interdisciplinary health research. This study was the first phase of a larger study examining evaluation of the interdisciplinary component of health research, and it was felt that researchers' in-vivo experiences and perceptions would be a suitable platform from which to build an evaluation framework for interdisciplinary research. Methods Design This was a descriptive study utilizing qualitative interviews to explore the experiences and perceptions of academic health researchers. Although focus groups were a possible data collection method, focus groups would not Page 2 of 10 (page number not for citation purposes) BMC Health Services Research 2008, 8:110 http://www.biomedcentral. com/1472-6963/8/110 have allowed for an in-depth examination of individual experiences. The study setting was the university environment as we were interested in understanding the perspective of health researchers working within academia. Sampling and data collection A purposeful approach to sampling was used [11]. Researchers, or key informants, with known experience of or expertise in interdisciplinary health research were invited to participate in this study as we wanted to learn from those who had already engaged in the conduct of interdisciplinary health research. This use of specific inclusion criteria is common when conducting key informant interviews [12]. Often studies that involve key informants start with the investigators drawing up a list of potential participants [12]. In this study, two of the study investigators (LD and KN) generated a small list of possible participants based on their knowledge of the type of research that they did (e.g. researchers completing interdisciplinary health research or having published findings from interdisciplinary research). Researchers who had worked together were