Gabriele Bammer – Page 6 – Integration and Implementation Insights

The ‘methods section’ in research publications on complex problems – Purpose

September 5, 2024October 11, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

Do we need a protocol for documenting how research tackling complex social and environmental problems was undertaken?

Usually when I read descriptions of research addressing a problem such as poverty reduction or obesity prevention or mitigation of the environmental impact of a particular development, I find myself frustrated by the lack of information about what was actually done. Some processes may be dealt with in detail, but others are glossed over or ignored completely.

For example, often such research brings together insights from a range of disciplines, but details may be scant on why and how those disciplines were selected, whether and how they interacted and how their contributions to understanding the problem were combined. I am often left wondering about whose job it was to do the synthesis and how they did it: did they use specific methods and were these up to the task? And I am curious about how the researchers assessed their efforts at the end of the project: did they miss a key discipline? would a different perspective from one of the disciplines included have been more useful? did they know what to do with all the information generated?

Why are interdisciplinary research proposals less likely to be funded? (Reblog)

September 5, 2024August 23, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

The first empirical support for a long-standing complaint by interdisciplinary researchers was recently published in the leading journal Nature. The Australian National University’s Lindell Bromham, Russell Dinnage and Xia Hua showed that interdisciplinary research is less likely to be funded than discipline-based research proposals (Nature, 534, 684–687 (30 June), DOI: 10.1038/nature18315).

They cleverly applied a technique from evolutionary biology that examines relatedness between biological lineages, using a hierarchical classification of research fields rather than an evolutionary tree. The relative representation of different field of research codes and their degree of difference were used as a proxy measure for interdisciplinarity.

The results, based on 5 years of data from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery program, are robust and are unaffected when number of collaborators, primary research field and type of institution are taken into account.

What does it mean?

Two frameworks for scoping

September 5, 2024August 16, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

How can all the possibilities for understanding and acting on a complex social or environmental problem be elucidated? How can a fuller appreciation of both the problem and the options for tackling it be developed, so that the best approach to dealing with it can be identified? In other words, how can a problem be scoped?

The point of scoping is to illuminate a range of options. It moves those dealing with the complex problem beyond their assumptions and existing knowledge to considering the problem and the possibilities for action more broadly.

Practicalities, however, dictate that everything cannot be included, so that scoping is inevitably followed by boundary setting.

In praise of multidisciplinarity

September 5, 2024August 2, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

What characterizes multidisciplinary research? When is it most appropriate? What does it take to do it well? Multidisciplinarity often gets a bad rap, being seen as less sophisticated than interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. But does it have its own important role in dealing with complex social and environmental problems?

Multidisciplinary research has two primary characteristics:

different disciplines independently shine their light on a particular problem, and
synthesis happens at the end and can be undertaken by anyone.

Unlike interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, there is no attempt to agree upfront on either a problem definition or on how the different perspectives will be brought together.

Six types of unknowns in interdisciplinary research

October 2, 2024May 10, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

What types of unknowns are tackled in interdisciplinary research? I draw on my experience directing a program of research on the feasibility of prescribing pharmaceutical heroin as a treatment for heroin dependence. Analysis of this case revealed six different types of unknowns:

Disciplinary unknowns
Unknowns of concern to stakeholders
Unknowns marginalised by power imbalances
Unknowns in the overlap between disciplines
New problem-based unknowns
Intractable unknowns.

Research impact: Six kinds of change

September 5, 2024March 29, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

What kinds of change can implementation of research findings contribute to? Sometimes the aim is to make change happen, while at other times research implementation is in response to particular proposed or ongoing change.

Making change happen

Two ways of making change happen that are important for research impact are: 1) contributing to the on-going quest for improvement and 2) combatting practices or behaviours that have negative outcomes for individuals or society.

Examples of contributing to the quest for ongoing improvement include technological research such as invention of thinner lenses to revolutionise cameras and social research such as development and implementation of a disability insurance scheme.

Do we need to discipline interdisciplinarity?

September 19, 2024March 2, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

Imagine a team of researchers tackling global health inequalities, with a focus on sanitation. The team comprises epidemiologists and biostatisticians interested both in measuring the extent of the problem and designing intervention trials, engineers investigating a range of sanitation options, anthropologists examining the cultural aspects of sanitation, economists and political scientists documenting the economic benefits and looking for policy levers to assist in making change happen.

The team is working at national policy levels and with a range of target communities seeking to engender small business interest in promoting new sanitation options, as well as individual and community behaviour change. There is collaboration with major international donors and non-government organisations. The team has a talented and charismatic leader.

What the team does not have is access to the full array of theory and methods for synthesising the input of the different disciplines, along with all the relevant stakeholder knowledge. Nor does it have the ability to bring to bear all the different ways of teasing out and taking into account the knowledge gaps – the unknowns. Finally the team cannot tap into the wealth of information about how to provide effective integrated research support for policy and practice change.

Three options for research impact: Informing, driving, triggering

April 7, 2026February 3, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

As a researcher, do you seek to inform change, drive it or trigger it? Informing change involves providing the best facts and evidence, driving change means working to achieve a particular research-based outcome, and triggering change involves solving a problem that sets in train a chain of effects that go far beyond the research itself. They involve different skills and have different risks.

Informing is probably the most common way in which researchers seek to achieve impact and much has been written about good communication strategies to make research published in peer-reviewed journals and books more accessible.

Informing is probably the most common way in which researchers seek to achieve impact and much has been written about good communication strategies to make research published in peer-reviewed journals and books more accessible. This includes effective use of social media and producing short, punchy, well-targeted verbal or written articles or briefs.

Where to publish? Journals for research integration and implementation concepts, methods and processes

September 5, 2024January 6, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

If you have developed a new dialogue method for bringing together insights from different disciplinary experts and stakeholders, or a refined modelling technique for taking uncertainty into account, or an innovative process for knowledge co-creation with government policy makers, where can you publish these to get maximum exposure and uptake?

Over the past several years, Peter Deane and I have been reviewing journals that publish concepts, methods and processes for:
•   Synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge
•   Understanding and managing diverse unknowns
•   Providing integrated research support (combining what we know and don’t know) for policy and practice change.
These are the components of what is referred to in this post as research integration and implementation. We have compiled information about more than 50 journals and regularly make additions (these are publicized bi-monthly in I2S News). We provide a brief synopsis of the journal aims, the most recent Thomson Reuters impact factor, the link to the journal website, and information about relevant special issues.
[Author note December 2022: The compilation of 90+ journals has been relocated to the ITD-Alliance website: https://itd-alliance.org/journals/ and they are no longer publicized in i2S News.]

Distinguishing between multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity – ‘theological’ hair-splitting or essential categorisation?

September 5, 2024November 25, 2015

By Gabriele Bammer

In a recent special issue of the journal Nature on interdisciplinarity (17 September 2015, p313-315), Rick Rylance criticised “arcane debates about whether research is inter-, multi-, trans-, cross- or post-disciplinary”, opining “I find this faintly theological hair-splitting unhelpful.” Does he have a point?

Rylance was discussing these distinctions in the context of research funding, especially relating to effective funding and evaluation of… well, what are we talking about and what are we going to call it? That’s the nub of the problem. For now, let’s stick with the term used by Rylance, namely “interdisciplinarity”.

Rylance also introduced a current project of the Global Research Council, which is comprised of the heads of science and engineering funding agencies from around the world. The Global Research Council has selected interdisciplinarity as one of its two annual themes for an in-depth report, debate and statement between now and mid-2016.

Why set up a blog site before you want to use it? First we need to find each other…

September 5, 2024May 11, 2015

By Gabriele Bammer

The aim of this site is to host a global conversation about… well one of the challenges is that we don’t yet have an agreed name for our topic.

This is a conversation for you if your research does some of the following:

Gets people from different disciplines working together
Builds models of complex social and environmental problems
Helps policy makers use research evidence
Figures out ways to manage value conflicts
Finds ways to identify unknown unknowns
Maps interconnections between problem elements
Works with business to build better products
Involves community groups in defining the problem
Worries about adverse unintended consequences
Realises that context matters.

I think about these practices as integration and implementation sciences. You might call them systems thinking, action research, interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, implementation science, post-normal science, mode 2 research, project management, complex systems science or a host of other terms.