Integration and Implementation Insights

By Dena Fam and Michael O’Rourke

What makes interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research challenging? What can go wrong and lead to failure? What has your experience been?

Modes of research that involve the integration of different perspectives, such as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, are notoriously challenging for a host of reasons. Interdisciplinary research requires the combination of insights from different academic disciplines and it is common that these:

• bear the stamp of different epistemologies; and,
• involve different types of data collected using different methods in the service of different explanations.