By Lawrence Susskind
How can interdisciplinary teams avoid getting stuck on questions like:
- What kinds of data do we need to collect?
- What methods or techniques should we use to analyze our data?
- How should we handle gaps or incongruities in our findings?
- What are the policy implications or prescriptions that follow from our findings?
I want to share some lessons I’ve learned about handling disagreements on these four questions.
Research Design
One interdisciplinary project I worked on many years ago involved trying to assess the feasibility of burying nuclear waste in the ocean floor. The engineers assumed the problem had an engineering solution.