26 Analyzing Disciplinary Insights
Rhonda D. Davis
The Importance of Analyzing Disciplinary Insights During the Interdisciplinary Research Process
By critically analyzing disciplinary insights, interdisciplinary researchers can more effectively evaluate and integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines to develop a more comprehensive understanding of complex problems. This process is essential for moving beyond superficial combinations of disciplinary perspectives and toward true interdisciplinary integration and understanding. Here are some key reasons interdisciplinarians analyze disciplinary insights:
- It allows researchers to compare and contrast insights from different disciplines, identifying conflicts between them and examining why they differ.
- It helps evaluate how each discipline’s perspective influences its insights, considering the assumptions, epistemology, concepts, theories, and methods used.
- It allows interdisciplinary researchers to assess the strengths and weaknesses of different theories and methods across disciplines, potentially identifying limitations or biases in disciplinary approaches.
- It enables placing disciplinary insights in the broader context of the complex problem being studied, rather than examining relationships in isolation.
- It helps identify critical variables or factors that may have been overlooked by individual disciplines.
- It encourages researchers to be explicit about searching for potential biases, both in disciplinary insights and their own analysis.
- It helps develop awareness of what different disciplines entail, including their phenomena of study, assumptions, epistemology, concepts, theories, and methods.
- It supports the critical pluralist position necessary for interdisciplinary work, viewing disciplinary perspectives as partial understandings rather than absolute truths or mere opinions.
- It facilitates “interdisciplinary communication” to bridge differences between disciplinary languages and approaches.
Examples
Let’s consider an example of critically analyzing disciplinary insights in interdisciplinary research on the topic of urban food deserts. This complex issue involves multiple disciplines, including urban planning, public health, sociology, economics, and environmental science.
Urban Food Deserts
1. Urban Planning Insight:
Urban planners might focus on zoning laws and city infrastructure, suggesting that food deserts result from poor urban design and lack of public transportation to grocery stores.
2. Public Health Insight:
Public health researchers might emphasize the health impacts, linking food deserts to higher rates of obesity and chronic diseases due to limited access to fresh, nutritious foods.
3. Sociological Insight:
Sociologists might point to systemic racism and socioeconomic inequalities as root causes, highlighting how food deserts disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities.
4. Economic Insight:
Economists might focus on market forces, arguing that supermarkets avoid certain areas due to lower profit potential and higher operating costs.
5. Environmental Science Insight:
Environmental scientists might emphasize the role of climate change and soil degradation in reducing local food production capabilities in urban areas.
By critically analyzing these diverse disciplinary insights, interdisciplinary researchers can develop a more comprehensive understanding of urban food deserts, potentially leading to more effective and holistic solutions that address multiple aspects of this complex issue. It’s important to compare and contrast disciplinary insights. While urban planners focus on physical infrastructure, sociologists emphasize social structures. This difference highlights the multifaceted nature of the problem.
It is important to evaluate perspectives as the economic perspective might overlook social justice issues, while the sociological view might not fully account for business realities. Recognizing these limitations is crucial for a comprehensive understanding. It’s also critical to assess methods used by various disciplines and applied fields. For example, public health researchers might rely heavily on quantitative data, while sociologists might use more qualitative methods. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each approach is crucial as well as understanding the methods and assumptions of each discipline. For instance, recognizing that economists often assume rational actor models, while sociologists might challenge this assumption.
The broader context is important as it can also help identify overlooked factors. For example, the environmental science insight reminds us to consider larger global trends affecting local food systems, which other disciplines might overlook while the interplay between zoning laws (urban planning) and systemic racism (sociology) might reveal important factors that neither discipline fully captures alone.
Another critical element of analyzing disciplinary insights is to examine biases. Researchers should consider how their own backgrounds might influence their interpretation of these insights. This goes along with developing interdisciplinary communication. Researchers need to bridge terminology differences, such as how “access” might be defined differently by urban planners (physical distance) versus sociologists (cultural and economic barriers).