External, Not Internal Challenges To Interdisciplinary Research

Am J Community Psychol (2006) 38:27–29 DOI 10.1007/s10464-006-9057-0

ORIGINAL PAPER

External, Not Internal Challenges to Interdisciplinary Research Marybeth Shinn

Published online: 27 June 2006 C Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006


Abstract This commentary draws on personal experience with interdisciplinary collaborations to suggest that Maton, Perkins, and Saegert (this issue) may overstate the challenges internal to interdisciplinary work groups. It supports their discussion of external challenges, and comments on the efforts they suggest to further interdisciplinary work. Keywords Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration Maton, Perkins, and Saegert (this issue) present a thoughtful analysis of benefits and the challenges of interdisciplinary research. I strongly endorse their discussion of the benefits of such work. In this admittedly idiosyncratic and anecdotal commentary, I draw on personal experiences to suggest that they may overstate the challenges internal to interdisciplinary work groups, but not the external challenges. I also express some cautions about some of their suggestions for furthering interdisciplinary work. Most of what I do involves work with people from other disciplines and/or outside the academy. Collaboration across disciplines of the form I have experienced has been so easy and natural that, until these private comments on an earlier version of the paper by Maton et al. (this issue) turned public, I have never thought to label the work as interdisciplinary or to write an article about it. I have rarely experienced the “conflicts with parties inhabiting different ‘life worlds’” that they dub “inevitable.” Of course, interdisciplinary work involves respect for the different ways of thinking and methodologiM. Shinn (
) Department of Psychology and Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University, 6 Washington Place, Room 275, New York, NY 10003 e-mail: [email protected]

cal tools people bring to the table, but so what? That would be even more true if I collaborated with laboratory psychologists in my own department, who often seem much further away from my thinking, and is as true when I work with developmental psychologists as with anthropologists. Over the years, I have worked on different projects with anthropologists, psychiatrists, an economist, developmental psychologists, academics in public health and public administration, government officials in three different City agencies (whose academic field I may not even know), and practitioners in community agencies, who have a variety of backgrounds, including community psychology. I always learn from the empirical, methodological, theoretical, and practical perspectives that my colleagues bring to the table, but typically, the work feels more “non-” than “inter-” or “trans-” disciplinary. I more naturally consider psychological constructs such as goals or needs than do my colleagues in other disciplines and I sometimes know more about mental health. Depending on their backgrounds, my collaborators are more attuned to different aspects of the situation. But because we are typically working on some problem, often having to do with homelessness or public assistance, the disciplines mostly melt away. I feel more like a generic social scientist than a community psychologist. An example would be my first interdisciplinary collaboration, with two faculty from New York University’s Graduate School of Public Administration, who wanted to respond to a City request for proposals to develop an early warning system for homelessness among families. Jim Knickman was trained as an economist, Beth Weitzman in public administration with a specialty in health research. They invited my involvement not as a psychologist, but as someone trained in survey research. We all contributed to that collaboration, but it would be hard to identify our contributions with our disciplinary backgrounds. In a longitudinal follow-up study Springer

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Weitzman and I spearheaded, we specialized in our roles a bit more. Although this specialization sometimes reflected our backgrounds (she took health and health services; I took mental health and social networks), for the most part, it was hard to see how specific disciplines played a role in the choices. A separate study with Knickman, on models for sheltering homeless families, had a clearer division of labor along disciplinary lines. As an economist, he focused on cost analysis; as a community psychologist, I focused on assessing shelter environments. Occasionally I feel like a community psychologist throughout a project, both because of my ignorance of issues others understand and because of what I bring to the table. For example, I worked with Nancy VanDevanter at the Columbia School of Public Health and Tracy Mayne and others at the New York City Department of Health to survey public health departments around the country and our local department about their use of behavioral and social sciences. The goal was to support Commissioner Neal Cohen’s effort to get more behavioral and social sciences integrated into the local department. The public health researchers knew a lot that I did not about the conceptual and operational organization of public health. As a community psychologist, I pushed a framework involving multiple levels of analysis, so that we considered community-level activities as well as individual behavior change in the survey, and advocated for more “higher-level” strategies in the resulting articles. Of course sometimes, even when the work seems nondisciplinary, some aspect of psychology, not necessarily community psychology, pops up and surprises me with its relevance. So, for example, by talking with psychologists, I brought signal detection models to the issue of targeting prevention programs for homeless people and declined to study features people use in deciding whether others they encounter on the street are homeless because cognitive research suggests that people do not simply count features in making categorizations. As Maton et al. (this issue) suggest, the fact that my interdisciplinary work has been largely problem-focused may well have facilitated interdisciplinary collaboration. Indeed, most of my theoretical writing, so far, has been solo or with other community psychologists. The exception, which might or might not count as theoretical, was an essay on prevention of homelessness written originally with one anthropologist, and later revised with the inclusion of a second anthropologist. (That may change, with a new collaboration led by the second anthropologist, Kim Hopper, that uses capability theory, developed by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, to think about the situations of marginalized groups such as individuals with serious mental illnesses and homeless individuals.) Perhaps if I had worked more across disciplines at the theoretical level, I would have Springer

encountered more of the sorts of the difficulties Maton et al. (this issue) describe. Further, my collaborations have not required all the facilitating factors Maton et al. (this issue) identify. Although some of my collaborations have been sustained over time, others have been briefer, around particular projects. And I have rarely been in physical proximity with my collaborators, outside of our scheduled research meetings. In one case, the essay on prevention of homelessness, I do not believe I even met my co-author, Jim Baumohl, before we presented our joint paper at a conference. We did know and respect each other’s work, of course, and had previously had some interactions at a distance—he had edited a book in which I had a chapter. We simply carried out our collaboration by phone and e-mail. The process was no more difficult than later writing an article on dissemination with a community psychologist, Robin Miller, whom I knew well back when she was a student, but with whom I had not been in regular contact. In the former case, a third colleague brokered the collaboration. In the latter, I came across some of Miller’s work that seemed highly relevant to (and more sophisticated than) some things I had been thinking, and asked her to collaborate. In both cases, we passed drafts back and forth, with an occasional phone call to hammer something out. I’m not suggesting that work at a distance is ideal, but it was no more difficult across than within disciplines. In both cases, these are existence proofs that electronic communications make proximity optional. The attitudinal factors Maton et al. (this issue) describe as facilitating collaboration are relevant. I have been blessed with smart, thoughtful collaborators in other disciplines who are open to ideas and easy to work with, but this does not differentiate them from my collaborators within community psychology. Nor do interdisciplinary projects have a different feel to them from projects I undertake with other community psychologists. If interdisciplinary work is easy, one might ask, why isn’t there more of it? Maton et al. (this issue) may underestimate the amount of interdisciplinary work that community psychologists do. None of the papers I have published with collaborators from other disciplines has included an interdisciplinary label that would be picked up in their PsycINFO search. And much of it does not end up in journals such as the American Journal of Community Psychology or the Journal of Community Psychology that proclaim, in their names, an allegiance to a particular discipline. Often my collaborators are more comfortable in journals with broader titles, such as the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Social Issues, or the Journal of Urban Health. Further, although I think Maton et al. (this issue) overstate the internal challenges of interdisciplinary research, I resonate more strongly to their analysis of external challenges. I have indeed experienced roadblocks from my psychology

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colleagues, who wonder what my work has to do with basic psychological and neurological processes, why I publish in odd journals, or why my community colleagues and I do “applied” work. Although psychology departments may value collaboration with some disciplines more than with others, the academic culture in faculties of arts and science more generally may make interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration seem a distraction from programmatic theoretical and empirical work. After all, one might be pulled in a new direction. To sidestep such concerns, I have taken a joint position with our explicitly interdisciplinary Graduate School of Public Administration. I have also experienced difficulties with funding agencies, as, for example, when reviewers at the National Institute of Mental Health suggested that only a more thorough diagnostic assessment of mental illnesses in homeless families than we had planned would make our research relevant to the mission of the Institute. My collaborators have sometimes encountered problems on their home turf as well. For example, collaborators in City agencies need to be sensitive to the political implications of research findings and to the hierarchical decision-making structure of their departments. It is perhaps relevant that many of my collaborators have been at interdisciplinary schools (public health, public administration) or institutes (the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research), or in community or government agencies where disciplines are not prominent. What does my experience suggest about Maton and colleagues’ discussion of future efforts to foster interdisciplinary work? I am skeptical of self-conscious efforts (such as conferences or workshops) to forge abstract formal linkages between allied disciplines or of the value of a standing committee on interdisciplinary linkages within the Society for Community Research and Action. I have never embarked on a project with the goal of building interdisciplinary linkages. I have always undertaken projects because they seemed conceptually interesting and challenging, and/or had potential to improve the lot of disenfranchised people. Similarly, I have chosen collaborations because they have seemed fruitful in understanding or solving a problem. However, I am all for exposing students to different fields in their training. My undergraduate degree was in so-

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cial relations, which combined anthropology, sociology, and psychology. My doctoral program required that we take at least two courses outside psychology, and I chose to combine social and community psychology, which are distinct cultures. Further, I was housed at the interdisciplinary Institute for Social Research at Michigan, where the fertile interplay of disciplines was obvious. Undergraduates who switch majors, complete double majors, or take minors understand that there are many approaches to knowledge — we should stop expunging that understanding in our graduate training. Explicitly interdisciplinary programs may avoid some of the “home turf” challenges to collaboration across disciplines. I worry a bit about the suggestion that we develop a more interdisciplinary identity for our field. Doing so could make it harder for community psychologists to flourish in psychology departments, although it might open up opportunities outside the arts and sciences. Advocates for interdisciplinarity should attend to who bears the costs and benefits that Maton et al. (this issue) enumerate. I am reminded of Ana Mari Cauce’s comments at the first Chicago conference on adventuresome research. She noted that as a mentor, she felt a responsibility to her students to assure that they learned traditional methods, and that “what one defines as intelligent risk taking . . . depends largely on one’s position in the academic and social hierarchy” Cauce, 1990, p. 208). Although junior researchers surely benefit from some interdisciplinary training, it is only more established researchers who may (or may not) succeed in efforts to “challenge and ultimately change the embedded reward systems that exist in our academic silos and in many funding agencies” (Maton et al., this issue).

References Cauce, A. M. (1990). A cautionary note about adventuresome research: Musings of a junior researcher. In P. Tolan, C. Keys, F. Chertok, & L. Jason (Eds.), Researching community psychology: Issues of theory and methods (pp. 205–209). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Maton, K. I., Perkins, D. D., & Saegert, S. (this issue). Community psychology at the crossroads: Prospects for interdisciplinary community research. American Journal of Community Psychology.

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