‘The pitfalls of the “add-and-stir” approach to transdisciplinary public health research’

Abstract

Health researchers increasingly include social scientific disciplines in their research programs, partly as a result of increasing recognition that complex public health issues benefit from a range of research approaches, and partly because funding bodies increasingly require transdisciplinarity. This commentary addresses the role of epistemology in transdisciplinary public health research (TPHR). We discuss two problems with current TPHR. The first problem is that social scientific input into TPHR is typically circumscribed to social, cultural, economic, and political analyses of a given public health issue, and further that these analyses only use social constructivist epistemologies. This narrow delineation under-utilizes a valuable, yet largely untapped resource; namely, various realist epistemologies regularly employed by social scientists, which are typically committed to anti-reductive and non-social constructivist understandings of scientific practices and knowledge. The second problem is the paucity of meta-analyses of the tacit epistemological cultures driving transdisciplinary research teams. The advantage of such meta-analyses is that they are able to make epistemologies explicit, which is the first step in actually integrating knowledge from different academic disciplines. Given that epistemological commitments guide research agendas – from what questions are asked and what methodologies are selected, to how findings are interpreted – understanding the role of epistemology stands to make an important contribution to improving TPHR.

Keywords:

• Transdisciplinarity
• public health
• epistemology

Notes

Notes

1. Realism is an expansive terrain including, for instance, critical realism (Bhaskar 1998, Sayer 2000), agential realism (Barad 2007), noncorrespondence realism (Pickering 1995), and speculative realism (Harman 2007).

2. The TTURC further defines transdisciplinarity as ‘the integration of measures and methodological approaches across different response systems and levels of analysis,’ which in turn will heighten a ‘methodological self-consciousness’ (Baker et al. 2003, p. S89, S91). As we have previously discussed, epistemology focuses on how researchers know what they know, whereas methodology is the manner in which research is conducted. Our contention with the TTURC's approach is that TPHR requires epistemological and methodological strategies, such that the latter does not take precedence over the former in the design and evaluation of collaborative research.