The Shaping of Research Design in Large-Scale Group Research

Abstract

one in which the task of integration is overburdened with extraneous affect. I hope no one will assume that I imagine these benefits are inevitably forthcoming simply as a consequence of mechanical rule of procedure. It seems to me that this device allows for the evolution of an indispensable and impalpable aid to interdisciplinary research: an atmosphere in which irrelevant anxieties are reduced and intellectual mutuality fostered. This sanguine air of high intellectual expectation seems to characterize the most successful and productive interdisciplinary research projects, and its absence is strikingly noticeable in those which are unsuccessful. Above all, and what must be especially stressed, is the gradualness of the process I have been describing and the great tax it places on patience and good will to be successful. Creativity cannot be coerced, and the attempt to be creative in a group is proportionally more complex than the sum of the difficulties faced by the individual scholars acting alone. The successful conduct of an interdisciplinary research enterprise imposes on its members and leadership the need to synchronize moods, feelings, and social relationship as well as their pattern of ideas and inquiry. Such a project, as I have defined its limits, must undertake to evolve the smaller teams in which cooperation can be carried on; it must help the participants define and fill a special role in which they can function both as specialists and non-specialists; and, finally, the group as a whole must be a tolerant one and seriously undertake the task of going beyond the safe, esteemed limits of specialization into the more difficult and uncertain terrain of synthesis. All this calls for a great hopefulness in the capacity of scholars to rise above the obstacles which stand in the way of such research; and interdisciplinary social science research is essentially an act of faith continually renewed by the hopeful.