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，人类面临的挑战表现在全球范围内，同时在多个规模上运行，并表现出复杂性，不能从孤立的角度进行处理。为了充分应对这些复杂的全球挑战，包括气候多变性、粮食安全和可持续能源，我们必须了解它们的复杂性。全球挑战表现出的那种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因素的统一组合。理解这一挑战通常需要涉及不同类型的专业知识的研究，每种专业知识都侧重于挑战的不同要素，并将其合并或整合到一个统一的账户中。这种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。研究全球挑战的人广泛采用这种整合，但没有对其进行系统的描述，这使得它缺乏理论化和理解力。缺乏理论发展破坏了我们对全球挑战的理解和应对它们的能力。本项目侧重于对科学话语中的CDI进行系统、详细的描述，并在结合不同学科视角的广泛背景下对其进行评估，即跨学科背景。该账户将扩展CDI的投入-过程-产出(IPO)模式，该模式在以前的工作中首次提出并成功试行。在将该模型建立在对心理学和其他领域的IPO方法的更一般理解之后，该项目将继续审查文献，其中CDI被用于解释跨学科现象，并在理论上对其进行建模。然后，将根据文献回顾中所学到的知识来开发和校准IPO模型，产生一个模型的版本，该模型在一系列背景下解释CDI，并为跨学科研究中综合现象的经验严格识别、解释和评估提供理论基础。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.