How to Move Towards a Common Understanding of Progress? A Transdisciplinary Exercise Involving 10 Young Researchers

Abstract

Early career (doctoral and postdoctoral) researchers often lack experience with transdisciplinary research despite their interest in tackling societal challenges with colleagues. Engagement in transdisciplinary research may not be an obvious choice because of limited support from their academic environment, difficulties of publishing, or a lack of suitable methods. In this work, we focus on the last. In order to evaluate several possible methodologies, we brought together a group of 10 young researchers from various disciplines to consider the question ‘What is progress?’. They examined this question via essay writing, a workshop, and a full-day colloquium, using methods that were based on examples from literature. After this process, input from the participants was gathered by means of a survey. Here, we provide an evaluation of existing methods and introduce four new methods: orientation exercise, census, individual reflection, walking consensus. Our results show that such a transdisciplinary exercise can readily be performed by a group of young researchers if the process is methodologically well structured, opening up opportunities for integrating such transdisciplinary insights in early career research.

Whole Person Modeling: a transdisciplinary approach to mental health research

“…Cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary are terms used to describe various approaches to research that involve the collaboration or integration of different disciplines (reviewed by [ 120 ]). Sometimes, these terms are referred to under the umbrella of “polydisciplinary” (or pluridisciplinary) approaches, in contrast to within-disciplinary or “intradiscipinary” (or monodisciplinary) approaches [ 121 ]. While these terms all imply collaboration and involvement of multiple disciplines, they differ in the manner and extent to which disciplines are combined.…”