Am J Community Psychol (2006) 38:27–29
DOI 10.1007/s10464-006-9057-0
ORIGINAL PAPER
External, Not Internal Challenges to Interdisciplinary Research
Marybeth Shinn
Published online: 27 June 2006

C Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006
Abstract This commentary draws on personal experience
with interdisciplinary collaborations to suggest that Maton,
Perkins, and Saegert (this issue) may overstate the chal-
lenges internal to interdisciplinary work groups. It supports
their discussion of external challenges, and comments on the
efforts they suggest to further interdisciplinary work.
Keywords Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration
Maton, Perkins, and Saegert (this issue) present a thoughtful
analysis of benefits and the challenges of interdisciplinary
research. I strongly endorse their discussion of the benefits
of such work. In this admittedly idiosyncratic and anecdotal
commentary, I draw on personal experiences to suggest that
they may overstate the challenges internal to interdisciplinary
work groups, but not the external challenges. I also express
some cautions about some of their suggestions for furthering
interdisciplinary work.
Most of what I do involves work with people from other
disciplines and/or outside the academy. Collaboration across
disciplines of the form I have experienced has been so easy
and natural that, until these private comments on an earlier
version of the paper by Maton et al. (this issue) turned public,
I have never thought to label the work as interdisciplinary or
to write an article about it. I have rarely experienced the “con-
flicts with parties inhabiting different ‘life worlds’” that they
dub “inevitable.” Of course, interdisciplinary work involves
respect for the different ways of thinking and methodologi-
M. Shinn (
)
Department of Psychology and Wagner Graduate School of
Public Service, New York University,
6 Washington Place, Room 275, New York, NY 10003
e-mail: beth.shinn@nyu.edu
cal tools people bring to the table, but so what? That would
be even more true if I collaborated with laboratory psychol-
ogists in my own department, who often seem much further
away from my thinking, and is as true when I work with
developmental psychologists as with anthropologists.
Over the years, I have worked on different projects with
anthropologists, psychiatrists, an economist, developmental
psychologists, academics in public health and public admin-
istration, government officials in three different City agencies
(whose academic field I may not even know), and practition-
ers in community agencies, who have a variety of back-
grounds, including community psychology. I always learn
from the empirical, methodological, theoretical, and prac-
tical perspectives that my colleagues bring to the table, but
typically, the work feels more “non-” than “inter-” or “trans-”
disciplinary. I more naturally consider psychological con-
structs such as goals or needs than do my colleagues in other
disciplines and I sometimes know more about mental health.
Depending on their backgrounds, my collaborators are more
attuned to different aspects of the situation. But because
we are typically working on some problem, often having to
do with homelessness or public assistance, the disciplines
mostly melt away. I feel more like a generic social scientist
than a community psychologist.
An example would be my first interdisciplinary collabora-
tion, with two faculty from New York University’s Graduate
School of Public Administration, who wanted to respond to
a City request for proposals to develop an early warning sys-
tem for homelessness among families. Jim Knickman was
trained as an economist, Beth Weitzman in public adminis-
tration with a specialty in health research. They invited my
involvement not as a psychologist, but as someone trained
in survey research. We all contributed to that collaboration,
but it would be hard to identify our contributions with our
disciplinary backgrounds. In a longitudinal follow-up study
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Weitzman and I spearheaded, we specialized in our roles a
bit more. Although this specialization sometimes reflected
our backgrounds (she took health and health services; I took
mental health and social networks), for the most part, it was
hard to see how specific disciplines played a role in the
choices. A separate study with Knickman, on models for
sheltering homeless families, had a clearer division of la-
bor along disciplinary lines. As an economist, he focused
on cost analysis; as a community psychologist, I focused on
assessing shelter environments.
Occasionally I feel like a community psychologist
throughout a project, both because of my ignorance of is-
sues others understand and because of what I bring to the
table. For example, I worked with Nancy VanDevanter at
the Columbia School of Public Health and Tracy Mayne
and others at the New York City Department of Health to
survey public health departments around the country and
our local department about their use of behavioral and so-
cial sciences. The goal was to support Commissioner Neal
Cohen’s effort to get more behavioral and social sciences
integrated into the local department. The public health re-
searchers knew a lot that I did not about the conceptual and
operational organization of public health. As a community
psychologist, I pushed a framework involving multiple levels
of analysis, so that we considered community-level activi-
ties as well as individual behavior change in the survey, and
advocated for more “higher-level” strategies in the resulting
articles.
Of course sometimes, even when the work seems non-
disciplinary, some aspect of psychology, not necessarily
community psychology, pops up and surprises me with its
relevance. So, for example, by talking with psychologists,
I brought signal detection models to the issue of targeting
prevention programs for homeless people and declined to
study features people use in deciding whether others they
encounter on the street are homeless because cognitive re-
search suggests that people do not simply count features in
making categorizations.
As Maton et al. (this issue) suggest, the fact that my in-
terdisciplinary work has been largely problem-focused may
well have facilitated interdisciplinary collaboration. Indeed,
most of my theoretical writing, so far, has been solo or with
other community psychologists. The exception, which might
or might not count as theoretical, was an essay on prevention
of homelessness written originally with one anthropologist,
and later revised with the inclusion of a second anthropol-
ogist. (That may change, with a new collaboration led by
the second anthropologist, Kim Hopper, that uses capability
theory, developed by economist Amartya Sen and philoso-
pher Martha Nussbaum, to think about the situations of
marginalized groups such as individuals with serious mental
illnesses and homeless individuals.) Perhaps if I had worked
more across disciplines at the theoretical level, I would have
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Am J Community Psychol (2006) 38:27–29
encountered more of the sorts of the difficulties Maton et al.
(this issue) describe.
Further, my collaborations have not required all the fa-
cilitating factors Maton et al. (this issue) identify. Although
some of my collaborations have been sustained over time,
others have been briefer, around particular projects. And I
have rarely been in physical proximity with my collabora-
tors, outside of our scheduled research meetings. In one case,
the essay on prevention of homelessness, I do not believe I
even met my co-author, Jim Baumohl, before we presented
our joint paper at a conference. We did know and respect
each other’s work, of course, and had previously had some
interactions at a distance—he had edited a book in which I
had a chapter. We simply carried out our collaboration by
phone and e-mail. The process was no more difficult than
later writing an article on dissemination with a community
psychologist, Robin Miller, whom I knew well back when
she was a student, but with whom I had not been in regular
contact. In the former case, a third colleague brokered the
collaboration. In the latter, I came across some of Miller’s
work that seemed highly relevant to (and more sophisticated
than) some things I had been thinking, and asked her to col-
laborate. In both cases, we passed drafts back and forth, with
an occasional phone call to hammer something out. I’m not
suggesting that work at a distance is ideal, but it was no more
difficult across than within disciplines. In both cases, these
are existence proofs that electronic communications make
proximity optional.
The attitudinal factors Maton et al. (this issue) describe
as facilitating collaboration are relevant. I have been blessed
with smart, thoughtful collaborators in other disciplines who
are open to ideas and easy to work with, but this does not
differentiate them from my collaborators within community
psychology. Nor do interdisciplinary projects have a different
feel to them from projects I undertake with other community
psychologists.
If interdisciplinary work is easy, one might ask, why isn’t
there more of it? Maton et al. (this issue) may underesti-
mate the amount of interdisciplinary work that community
psychologists do. None of the papers I have published with
collaborators from other disciplines has included an interdis-
ciplinary label that would be picked up in their PsycINFO
search. And much of it does not end up in journals such as the
American Journal of Community Psychology or the Journal
of Community Psychology that proclaim, in their names, an
allegiance to a particular discipline. Often my collaborators
are more comfortable in journals with broader titles, such as
the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Social
Issues, or the Journal of Urban Health.
Further, although I think Maton et al. (this issue) overstate
the internal challenges of interdisciplinary research, I res-
onate more strongly to their analysis of external challenges.
I have indeed experienced roadblocks from my psychology
Am J Community Psychol (2006) 38:27–29
colleagues, who wonder what my work has to do with basic
psychological and neurological processes, why I publish in
odd journals, or why my community colleagues and I do “ap-
plied” work. Although psychology departments may value
collaboration with some disciplines more than with others,
the academic culture in faculties of arts and science more
generally may make interdisciplinary and intersectoral col-
laboration seem a distraction from programmatic theoretical
and empirical work. After all, one might be pulled in a new
direction. To sidestep such concerns, I have taken a joint po-
sition with our explicitly interdisciplinary Graduate School
of Public Administration.
I have also experienced difficulties with funding agencies,
as, for example, when reviewers at the National Institute of
Mental Health suggested that only a more thorough diagnos-
tic assessment of mental illnesses in homeless families than
we had planned would make our research relevant to the
mission of the Institute. My collaborators have sometimes
encountered problems on their home turf as well. For exam-
ple, collaborators in City agencies need to be sensitive to the
political implications of research findings and to the hierar-
chical decision-making structure of their departments. It is
perhaps relevant that many of my collaborators have been at
interdisciplinary schools (public health, public administra-
tion) or institutes (the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric
Research), or in community or government agencies where
disciplines are not prominent.
What does my experience suggest about Maton and col-
leagues’ discussion of future efforts to foster interdisci-
plinary work? I am skeptical of self-conscious efforts (such
as conferences or workshops) to forge abstract formal link-
ages between allied disciplines or of the value of a stand-
ing committee on interdisciplinary linkages within the So-
ciety for Community Research and Action. I have never
embarked on a project with the goal of building interdis-
ciplinary linkages. I have always undertaken projects be-
cause they seemed conceptually interesting and challenging,
and/or had potential to improve the lot of disenfranchised
people. Similarly, I have chosen collaborations because they
have seemed fruitful in understanding or solving a prob-
lem. However, I am all for exposing students to different
fields in their training. My undergraduate degree was in so-
29
cial relations, which combined anthropology, sociology, and
psychology. My doctoral program required that we take at
least two courses outside psychology, and I chose to com-
bine social and community psychology, which are distinct
cultures. Further, I was housed at the interdisciplinary In-
stitute for Social Research at Michigan, where the fertile
interplay of disciplines was obvious. Undergraduates who
switch majors, complete double majors, or take minors un-
derstand that there are many approaches to knowledge — we
should stop expunging that understanding in our graduate
training. Explicitly interdisciplinary programs may avoid
some of the “home turf” challenges to collaboration across
disciplines.
I worry a bit about the suggestion that we develop a more
interdisciplinary identity for our field. Doing so could make it
harder for community psychologists to flourish in psychol-
ogy departments, although it might open up opportunities
outside the arts and sciences. Advocates for interdisciplinar-
ity should attend to who bears the costs and benefits that
Maton et al. (this issue) enumerate. I am reminded of Ana
Mari Cauce’s comments at the first Chicago conference on
adventuresome research. She noted that as a mentor, she felt
a responsibility to her students to assure that they learned
traditional methods, and that “what one defines as intelligent
risk taking . . . depends largely on one’s position in the aca-
demic and social hierarchy” Cauce, 1990, p. 208). Although
junior researchers surely benefit from some interdisciplinary
training, it is only more established researchers who may
(or may not) succeed in efforts to “challenge and ultimately
change the embedded reward systems that exist in our aca-
demic silos and in many funding agencies” (Maton et al.,
this issue).
References
Cauce, A. M. (1990). A cautionary note about adventuresome research:
Musings of a junior researcher. In P. Tolan, C. Keys, F. Chertok,
& L. Jason (Eds.), Researching community psychology: Issues of
theory and methods (pp. 205–209). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Maton, K. I., Perkins, D. D., & Saegert, S. (this issue). Community
psychology at the crossroads: Prospects for interdisciplinary com-
munity research. American Journal of Community Psychology.
Springer