Week 1

Crossdisciplinary

Crossdisciplinary refers to knowledge that explains aspects of one discipline in terms of another. Common examples of crossdisciplinary approaches are studies of the physics of music or the politics of literature.

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary refers to new knowledge extensions that exist between or beyond existing academic disciplines or professions. The new knowledge may be claimed by members of none, one, both, or an emerging new academic discipline or profession.

An interdisciplinary community or project is made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is what new knowledge (of an academic discipline nature), which is outside the existing disciplines, is required to address the challenge. Aspects of the challenge cannot be addressed easily with existing distributed knowledge, and new knowledge becomes a primary subgoal of addressing the common challenge. The nature of the challenge, either its scale or complexity, requires that many people have interactional expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the new interdisciplinary area. An interdisciplinarary person is a person with degrees from one or more academic disciplines with additional interactional expertise in one or more additional academic disciplines, and new knowledge that is claimed by more than one discipline. Over time, interdisciplinary work can lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines.

Transdisciplinary

Transdisciplinary refers to knowledge that exists in every individual, thus eliminating the need for discipline boundaries.

A transdisciplinary community or project is made up of transdisciplinary professionals, which is an ideal that can only be approached and not actually achieved in practice. To exist in today's society, a transdisciplinary professional would possess certification or degrees in all disciplines as well as experience in all professions. In essence, a truly transdisciplinary person contains all the distributed knowledge of the people in the community or project as their individual common knowledge. Furthermore, they exist within a community of people that share that knowledge. A transdisciplinary community is one in which common knowledge of individuals and the distributed knowledge of the collective are identical.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is a method of inquiry employed in many different academic disciplines, traditionally in the social sciences, but also in market research and further contexts. Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where,when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often needed than large samples.

Ethnography

Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos = folk/people and γράφω grapho = to write) is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group. It was pioneered in the field of socio-cultural anthropology but has also become a popular method in various other fields of social sciences—particularly in sociology, communication studies, history. —that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies and cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, an ethnos) through writing. In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a "field study" or a "case report," both of which are used as common synonyms for "ethnography".