Investigating communication hindrance in interdisciplinary collaboration: A grounded theory approach

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is two‐fold: (1) to explore the communication barriers and challenges that interdisciplinary researchers might encounter when collaborating with their counterparts from other disciplines, and (2) to survey how the researchers mitigate the hurdles in the collaboration processes. Eight interdisciplinary researchers from a research institute were recruited to participate in the study. They were individually interviewed with a semi‐structured protocol. The interview transcripts were then analyzed using a grounded theory approach that consists of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding in sequence. The preliminary results show that the major communication hindrances include: domain disparity; discrepancies of individual researchers in terms of their perspectives, preferences, and behaviors; varied interpretations on the meanings of shared artifacts used by the interdisciplinary research groups; and divergence of personal motivation and engagement levels toward interdisciplinary collaboration. The participants considered active and constant learning to be the most useful strategy to cope with these communication obstacles. These findings yield some novel insights into the interdisciplinary collaboration effort and provide new empirical evidence to substantiate what previous studies have found. In addition, this study generates a deeper understanding about communication difficulties that interdisciplinary researchers might face, which can in turn be translated into practical implications for administrators and policy makers who are responsible for managing interdisciplinary collaborations.