Stronger together—A framework for measuring interdisciplinary understanding

摘要

Our society currently faces complex ecological, social, and economic challengesthat require collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches. Although interest ininterdisciplinary research is growing, it is still confronted with significant obstaclesstemming from difficulties in establishing a common understanding. While othershave evaluated interdisciplinary in a top-down funding-oriented ex ante manner ora result-oriented ex post manner, this focus paper intends to create a frameworkthat enables the measurement of interdisciplinary understanding within a group.Therefore, using the case of the interdisciplinary Boysen-TU Dresden ResearchGroup, a framework for measuring interdisciplinary understanding (MIU) is presented.The basis of the framework is the development of dimensions based on thespecific composition and requirements of the interdisciplinary group. With thisframework, two main contributions are provided. First, interdisciplinary understandingwithin a research group can be measured with respect to the defineddimensions. Through discussions on the differences of the understanding of projectsover the dimensions, it is possible to establish a common understanding ofprojects. Second, the interdisciplinarity within a group or interdisciplinary distancebetween two specific research projects can be evaluated in order to identify possibledifficulties in understanding, as well as recognizing potentials for interdisciplinaryresearch. The MIU framework and the dimensions established in this paper can beadapted and transferred to any interdisciplinary research group to improve jointunderstanding of researchers and enable them to tackle complex techno-societalproblems of the future.