Disciplinary scholars are trained in disciplinary methodologies as students. This training inevitably includes a lot of practical advice on how to produce disciplinary research. Interdisciplinary scholars often lack such training. Yet there are a common set of challenges faced by interdisciplinary researchers and a set of strategies that have been found useful by numerous researchers in addressing these challenges.
We have already addressed some of these challenges:
There are communication challenges associated with differences in both perspective and terminology across disciplines. In research teams these communication problems need to be addressed for the team to function well. Individual interdisciplinary researchers will struggle both to understand disciplinary literatures and to communicate results in a way that scholars in diverse disciplines can comprehend and appreciate.
Interdisciplinary scholars bring two important additions to the task of evaluating previous research. They can ask to what extent research results are driven by disciplinary perspective. And they can explore why scholars from different disciplines disagree.
There are other challenges:
Our libraries are structured around disciplines. Finding relevant information across disciplines is thus itself challenging. (It does not have to be so hard. See Szostak, Gnoli, and Lopez-Huertas, Interdisciplinary Knowledge Organization, 2016 for a vision of a better approach to classifying books and articles – and ideas and objects more generally.)
Interdisciplinary research often investigates complex systems of interaction among diverse phenomena. It is often useful to visually map this system and ask which theories and methods are best suited to different phenomena and relationships.
Interdisciplinary researchers often employ multiple methods. There is a whole literature on mixed methods research. (See for example the Oxford Handbook of Multimethod and Mixed Method Research (Hesse-Bulber and Johnson eds., 2015.)
Perhaps the most obvious and most important challenge involves integration itself: How exactly does one create common ground if scholars from different disciplines are reaching different conclusions? We can briefly sketch here a handful of useful strategies:
Redefinition
Redefinition involves altering the way a concept is employed by different authors in order to achieve a common meaning. This technique is powerful when authors appear to be disagreeing because they are using the same concept in different ways. When one redefines a concept, and then restates the authors’ insights in terms of the redefined concept, the apparent conflict vanishes. In other cases, redefinition resolves only some of the conflict between insights, but by clarifying the nature of this conflict sets the stage for the use of other techniques. At times, redefinition involves clarifying distinct meanings of a concept. The redefined concept or concepts serves as the common ground. (Recall that integration involves finding some common ground among competing insights.)
Theory Extension
Theory extension involves extending a theory, or the assumptions underlying a theory, so that it includes elements identified by other authors. This technique works best when different insights are potentially complementary. Different authors emphasize different causal factors, but there is no reason why these cannot work in concert. If one is extending a theory, it is generally best to extend the theory that is already the most comprehensive. If no theory is very comprehensive, then the interdisciplinary researcher can usefully explore whether there is some common set of assumptions that might allow theories to be combined. The extended theory or assumption is the common ground.
Organization
Organization involves using a map to show how different insights are related. If one author stresses cultural influences on a particular behavior, and another stresses personal influences, organization might involve showing how culture influences personal decisions that affect behavior. The map becomes the common ground. Note that it will often prove useful to group the phenomena emphasized by different authors into broader categories (such as cultural attitudes).
Transformation
Transformation is a technique for addressing opposites by placing these on a continuum. If one author assumes that agents behave rationally in a particular situation, but another author assumes irrationality, the interdisciplinarian can appreciate that there is a continuum between perfect rationality and perfect irrationality, identify where on that continuum agents are likely to lie in a particular situation, and then draw on each of the opposing insights appropriately. The continuum is the common ground.
It is unfair to evaluate interdisciplinary research by disciplinary standards – though of course interdisciplinary researchers can be expected to employ (and interpret) disciplinary theories and methods appropriately. It is clearly unfair for a disciplinary scholar to critique interdisciplinary research for simply employing unfamiliar theories or methods, or engaging unfamiliar subjects. Yet it is absolutely critical that interdisciplinary research be evaluated by some standards. As noted at the outset, the entire interdisciplinary project is weakened by every example of superficial interdisciplinary scholarship. Reviewers can reasonably ask if various steps in the interdisciplinary research process have been performed well. If recommended strategies have not been employed this should be explained.
A detailed discussion of the challenges and strategies of interdisciplinary research is available on the "About Interdisciplinarity" set of webpages of the Association for Interdisciplinarity Studies. See Best practices for interdisciplinary research
Bergmann, Matthias , Thomas Jahn, Tobias Knobloch, Wolfgang Krohn, Christian Pohl, and Engelbert Schramm (2012) Methods for Transdisciplinary Research: A Primer for Practice. Berlin: Campus, provide a great deal of advice on performing transdisciplinary research.
Catherine Lyall and collaborators provide a series of four-page guides to both performing (especially in teams) and evaluating interdisciplinary research.
Allen Repko and Rick Szostak, 2017, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, 3rd ed., Thousand Oaks: Sage, describe a ten-stage process of interdisciplinary research, providing strategies for each step, and examples from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.