What were the instruments that are used in surveys that are placed in the foreground to emphasise the scientific nature of the project
Answers
Given the challenges of communication in collaborative, inter-
disciplinary research highlighted in previous parts of this
volume, difficulty in communication can seem an unavoidable cost
of “doing business” in such a context. Project leaders and senior
personnel can be resistant to available approaches to improving
communication, which might seem irrelevant, a waste of time, or
worse. At the same time, project participants can feel that they are
on their own in their effort to function effectively within their team.
Fortunately, communication among collaborators can be enhanced
by reflection on the process of collaborative, interdisciplinary
research and specifically on how the team understands and approaches
this type of research. This attention to process can have the greatest
impact if undertaken early in a team’s life, before unproductive pat-
terns become established.
This part of the volume presents specific tools that can be utilized
by collaborators to illuminate their research process and improve
their communicative efficiency. Each of the approaches in this part
rests on proven techniques for enhancing collaborative communica-
tion: dialogue methods in Chapters 11 and 12, concept maps in
Chapter 12, and models in Chapter 13. In each case, the tool sup-
plied can be understood either as a boundary object—that is, an
object held in common by collaborators from different disciplines
that can be used as a “means of translation” between them—or a
means of discovering boundary objects.1
These boundary objects can struc-
ture a team’s reflection on its own processes, enabling it to transcend habits
that undermine effective team communication.
The first chapter in Part III is a contribution from the Toolbox Project, a
U.S. National Science Foundation–sponsored initiative that uses philosoph-
ical concepts to enhance communication in collaborative, cross-disciplinary
scientific teams. The Toolbox Project has developed a dialogue method that
involves use of a survey instrument, the “Toolbox,” in workshop settings. In
“Seeing Through the Eyes of Collaborators: Using Toolbox Workshops to
Enhance Cross-Disciplinary Communication,” members of the Toolbox
Project provide a detailed, step-by-step description of the Toolbox method
that is designed to enable readers to conduct their own Toolbox workshop.
After articulating the leading idea and providing evidence of effectiveness,
the chapter supplies a protocol that covers workshop preparation, facilita-
tion, and follow-up.
In Chapter 12, “Integration of Frameworks and Theories Across Disci-
plines for Effective Cross-Disciplinary Communication,” Wayde C. Morse
develops a method based on concept mapping and dialogue for generating
an “interdisciplinary metatheoretical framework to guide research” (p. 000).
Morse characterizes disciplinary research with the nested concepts of frame-
work and theory—many theories about aspects of a domain can be con-
tained within a broader conceptual framework. Frameworks and theories
“conceptualize taxonomies of components and fundamental underlying
assumptions about the nature of the world regarding their subject matter”
(p. 000). When researchers collaborate across disciplines, as they must to
address complex problems, their frameworks and theories can be incom-
mensurable in various ways. As has been argued elsewhere in this volume,
these differences create communication challenges that must be surmounted
or at least addressed if effective, integrative responses to these problems are
to be produced. Morse offers an iterative dialogue method based on a sys-
tematic approach to concept mapping that can guide an interdisciplinary
research team from interdisciplinary theme development and problem for-
mulation through to the creation of a “team systems concept map” or
“metatheoretical framework.” This map guides collaborative research effort
by systematically demonstrating ways of integrating disciplinary frame-
works and theories.
Laura Schmitt Olabisi, Stuart Blythe, Arika Ligmann-Zielinska, and
Sandra Marquart-Pyatt present quantitative computer models as tools for
enhancing interdisciplinary communication and collaboration in Chapter 13,