Abstract
Growing recognition that collaboration among scientists from diverse disciplines fosters the emergence of solutions to complex scientific problems has spurred initiatives to train researchers to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. Evaluations of collaboration patterns in these initiatives have tended to be cross-sectional, rather than clarifying temporal changes in collaborative dynamics. Mobile health (mHealth), the science of using mobile, wireless devices to improve health outcomes, is a field whose advancement needs interdisciplinary collaboration. The NIH-supported annual mHealth Training Institute (mHTI) was developed to meet that need and provides a unique testbed. In this study, we applied a longitudinal social network analysis technique to evaluate how well the program fostered communication among the disciplinarily diverse scholars participating in the 2017-2019 mHTIs. By applying separable temporal exponential random graph models, we investigated the formation and persistence of project-based and fun conversations during the mHTIs. We found that conversations between scholars of different disciplines were just as likely as conversations within disciplines to form or persist in the 2018 and 2019 mHTI, suggesting that the mHTI achieved its goal of fostering interdisciplinary conversations and could be a model for other team science initiatives; this finding is also true for scholars from different career stages. The presence of team and gender homophily effects in certain years suggested that scholars tended to communicate within the same team or gender. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of longitudinal network models in evaluating team science initiatives while clarifying the processes driving interdisciplinary communications during the mHTIs.
Highlights
The need for interdisciplinary thinking and communication has gained prominence in team science given the need for research teams to work together to solve complex scientific problems.[1,2,3] Interdisciplinary thinking indicates the capacity to integrate knowledge and research approaches from two or more disciplines to understand a phenomenon or solve a problem that could not have been achieved through a single discipline.[4]
Network Measures We studied the evolution of communication among interdisciplinary scholars embedded for one week at the mHealth Training Institutes (mHTI) during the years 2017 - 2019
An anti-egalitarian, hierarchical dynamic influenced the formation and persistence of both kinds of conversations. This is shown from the cyclical ties and transitive ties terms in the models, which are negative and positive respectively across the models for all the years. These hierarchical relationships were more likely than egalitarian relationships to form and persist in the mHTI
Summary
The need for interdisciplinary thinking and communication has gained prominence in team science given the need for research teams to work together to solve complex scientific problems.[1,2,3] Interdisciplinary thinking indicates the capacity to integrate knowledge and research approaches from two or more disciplines to understand a phenomenon or solve a problem that could not have been achieved through a single discipline.[4]. The importance of interdisciplinary thinking within the area of mHealth has been highlighted by studies which have found that mHealth solutions developed from a consideration of broader perspectives are more effective than those developed with just a single perspective.[15,16,17,18] one goal of this study is to understand whether the mHTI program can foster interdisciplinary conversations and be a model for understanding how interdisciplinary thinking and collaborations can be nurtured Another goal is to apply and evaluate how novel longitudinal, model-based social network analysis techniques can evaluate this and other similar programs. 2017 Freq. (%) 5 (16.7) 7 (23.3) 6 (20.0) 7 (23.3) 5 (16.7) 8 (26.7) 22 (73.3) 17 (56.7) 13 (43.3) 10 (33.3) 10 (33.3) 5 (16.7) 5 (16.7) Mean (SD)
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