A Theory of Integration in Crossdisciplinary Research and Practice

科学家、资助者和政策制定者一致认为，人类面临的挑战在全球范围内表现出来，同时在多个尺度上运作，并且表现出无法从孤立的角度进行治疗的复杂性。要充分应对这些复杂的全球性挑战，包括气候变化、粮食安全和可持续能源，我们必须了解它们的复杂性。全球性挑战所表现出的复杂性，至少在一定程度上涉及以复杂方式相互作用的不同元素的统一组合。理解这样的挑战通常需要涉及不同类型的专业知识的研究，每个专业知识都专注于挑战的不同元素，这些元素被组合或集成到一个统一的帐户中。这类整合——可以被称为跨学科整合（CDI），以突出来自各个学科的专业知识的中心地位——被那些研究全球挑战的人广泛采用，但是没有对它进行系统的描述，使得它缺乏理论化和理解。这种理论发展的缺乏削弱了我们对全球挑战的理解和应对能力。本项目的重点是在科学话语中对CDI进行系统、详细的描述，并在不同学科观点相结合的广泛背景下（即跨学科背景）对其进行评估。该账户将扩展CDI的投入-过程-产出（IPO）模型，该模型在之前的工作中首次提出并成功试点。在对心理学和其他领域的IPO方法有了更普遍的理解之后，该项目将继续对CDI用于解释跨学科现象的文献进行回顾，并在其中对其进行理论建模。然后，将根据文献综述中了解到的内容开发和校准IPO模型，产生一个在一系列背景下解释CDI的模型版本，并为跨学科研究中综合现象的实证严格识别、解释和评估提供理论基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Scientists, funders, and policy makers agree that there are challenges confronting humanity that manifest globally, operate at multiple scales simultaneously, and exhibit complexity that defies treatment from isolated perspectives. To adequately respond to these complex, global challenges, which include climate variability, food security, and sustainable energy, we must understand their complexity. The kind of complexity exhibited by global challenges involves, at least in part, the unified combination of different elements that interact in complex ways. Understanding such a challenge is typically taken to require research involving different types of expertise, each focused on a different element of the challenge, that are combined, or integrated, into a unified account. Integration of this sort – which can be called cross-disciplinary integration (CDI) to highlight the centrality of expertise from across the academic disciplines – is widely deployed by those who investigate global challenges, but there is no systematic account of it, leaving it under-theorized and poorly understood. This lack of theoretical development undermines our understanding of global challenges and our ability to respond to them.This project focuses on developing a systematic, detailed account of CDI in scientific discourse and evaluating it across a wide range of contexts in which different disciplinary perspectives are combined, i.e., cross-disciplinary contexts. This account will expand an input-process-output (IPO) model of CDI first proposed and successfully piloted in previous work. After grounding the model in a more general understanding of IPO approaches in psychology and elsewhere, the project will proceed with a review of literatures in which CDI is used to explain cross-disciplinary phenomena and in which it is theoretically modeled. The IPO model will then be developed and calibrated in light of what is learned in the literature reviews, yielding a version of the model that explains CDI across a range of contexts and provides a theoretical foundation for empirically rigorous identification, explanation, and evaluation of integrative phenomena in cross-disciplinary research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.