Interdisciplinary integration

The research master Brain and Cognitive Sciences is an interdisciplinary master's programme and as such we encourage student think about research that combines ideas from different fields.

Interdisciplinarity

But what does interdisciplinarity mean? The most schematic way to look at it is to contrast it with multidisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity is when you have different fields working on the same topic and providing distinct perspectives, but not recombining them. Interdisciplinarity is when the recombination does happen, so that the distinct perspectives are integrated into a new whole. In the visualisation below (adapted from Menken et al., 2016) the top figure denotes multidisciplinarity, while the lower figure depicts interdisciplinarity.

Integration types

Of course, this is still not very actionable. How are the strands in the lower figure tied together? How do you go about integrating? The truth is, there are many different ways. You could, example:

• Bring theoretical frameworks from different fields together. This often comes down to explaining a concept from one discipline in terms of concepts from another discipline. Such a new, integrated framework can yield new research questions which you might pursue in your project.
• Use a method from one field and use it in a different one. For example, a paradigm from animal research might be reconsidered in a human context. Or perhaps a particular modelling approach from linguistics can be put to use to handle an open question from clinical psychology.
• Integrate the (expected) research results. This is a type of integration where you do research using the paradigms from one field, but interpret the results in light of the theory from another field.

You are not limited to these options: any type of meaningful cross-talk between fields can be considered as a type of interdisciplinary integration.

Integration methods

There is no sure-fire way to achieve integration, but there are a number of tools that might do the job.

• In any case, bringing together distinct disciplines always requires finding common ground.
• If you are integrating theories on a particular topic from different disciplines, it is useful to make an interdisciplinary causal map on that topic.
• If you aim to insert a method from one discipline into the theoretical framework of another, you can build an operationalisation bridge between the disciplines.

References

Menken, S., Keestra, M., Rutting, L., Post, G., de Roo, M., Blad, S., & de Greef, L. (2016). An introduction to interdisciplinary research: Theory and practice. Amsterdam University Press.