Multidisciplinary Research Agenda Research Articles

From “It’s All in Your Head ” to “Taking Back the Month”: Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) Research and the Contributions of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

Our understanding of Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) as a cultural entity and a medical concern has developed from different disciplines and represents a range of intellectual approaches to a complex, ill-understood phenomenon. Unfortunately, there has been little interaction among the disciplines at an integrative level of research, outside of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research (SMCR) conferences and publications. This paper chronicles the history of PMS research, which began in mid-19th century America, and focuses on the contributions from the SMCR conferences that brought together scholars, clinicians, scientists, and women’s health advocates from across disciplines and nations to advance a multidisciplinary research agenda and the knowledge of perimenstrual experiences and syndromes.

Reducing Cancer Disparities for Minorities: A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda to Improve Patient Access to Health Systems, Clinical Trials, and Effective Cancer Therapy

Ethnic diversity in recruitment is a vital prerequisite to eliminating health disparities in cancer treatment, control and prevention programs. Much anecdotal reporting, but little scientific rigor, has been applied to the study of methods to improve the recruitment of minorities into cancer control or treatment trials. Even the most innovative research is stymied by the lack of representative samples of the populations that the research is designed to serve. The goals of this article are to describe a theory-driven framework for improving minority recruitment to clinical and cancer control trials, to explain organizational prerequisites to improving minority recruitment, and to provide empirical evidence of success in initial efforts to recruit to cancer control studies. These programs are offered as models for improving minority recruitment to cancer-control and -treatment trials, and minority access to cancer treatment in general.

Research strategies for optimizing pregnancy outcomes in minority populations

The elimination of disparities in pregnancy outcomes is a common goal of clinicians and scientists and requires the collaboration of many disciplines to address the complexities of this still-increasing perinatal health concern. This commentary synthesizes the presentations and dialogue from a multidisciplinary workgroup meeting that was sponsored by the National Institute of Nursing Research in 2003. Concepts that are central to our understanding of the development and expression of such disparities are summarized, and approaches that are recognized as important in multiple disciplines that include basic, clinical, and social sciences are presented. Research strategies to foster a multidisciplinary research agenda are presented as a basis for future endeavors to improve pregnancy outcomes.

Cancer disparities: developing a multidisciplinary research agenda ? preface

In this Special Issue, we present a series of papers concerned with developing a multidisciplinary research agenda to address social disparities in cancer. Motivating this Special Issue are two concerns: (1) despite major advances in knowledge during the 20th century about the extent, determinants, treatment, and prevention of cancer, social disparities in cancer, including within the United States, remain serious, persistent, and require redress; and (2) huge gaps in knowledge exist regarding the causes of and solutions to social disparities in cancer across the full cancer continuum, from prevention to occurrence to diagnosis to treatment and, all too often, to death. Consequently, critical research is critically needed, both to answer the unanswered questions and to ascertain why existing knowledge is not implemented to reduce and eliminate these disparities. To help advance work in this field, we share papers developed for a January 2004 workshop on cancer disparities held at the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), in Boston, MA. Topics addressed include: the definition and magnitude of, and programmatic responses to, social disparities in cancer, plus development of a systematic approach to raising research questions to address cancer disparities, using the case examples of breast, cervix, colon, and prostate cancer.

Defining and investigating social disparities in cancer: critical issues

Research and action to address social disparities in cancer requires clarity about what constitutes and causes these persistent and onerous inequities in health. Currently, both scientific literature and government documents exhibit important disagreements, confused terminology, and considerable, if not deliberate, vagueness about the meaning of the phrase 'cancer disparities' and the related term 'social disparities in health.' This article accordingly reviews critical issues relevant to cohering understanding of what is meant by 'cancer disparities;' offers a definition premised on the causal contention that social disparities in health, by definition, arise from social inequity; and considers its implications for developing a multidisciplinary research agenda on social inequalities in cancer. Tackling this issue will require rigorous and critical frameworks, questions, and methods derived from multiple disciplines, and will necessarily involve epidemiologic, clinical, and intervention research, both quantitative and qualitative. At issue is making conscious research choices: about which types of disparities we study, in relation to which aspect of cancer, so as to improve the likelihood our research will help inform a society-wide discourse about the extent, origins of, and remedies for social injustices in cancer, thereby aiding efforts to eliminate social inequalities in health.

Methodological and Measurement Issues in School Violence Research

SUMMARY School violence became a topic of broad national concern in the United States in reaction to a series of tragic school shootings during the 1990s. Efforts to understand and prevent school shootings have stimulated the rapid development of a broader interest in school safety with an emerging multidisciplinary research agenda. The maturation and fulfillment of this research agenda require that researchers critically examine their research methods and measurement strategies. This article introduces a volume that examines fundamental methodological and measurement issues in the rapidly expanding body of research on school safety and violence. The authors hope to stimulate greater attention to methodological pitfalls and critical measurement issues that hinder research progress in several related areas, including the uncertain reliability and validity of self-report surveys used to measure high-risk behavior and bullying, the limitations of discipline referral databases as a source of information on school climate, and the overly narrow focus on relatively infrequent critical incidents of violence, often at the expense of a more comprehensive and multifactorial examination of the school environment.

Ecological Forecasting and the Urbanization of Stream Ecosystems: Challenges for Economists, Hydrologists, Geomorphologists, and Ecologists

The quantity and quality of freshwater resources are now being seriously threatened, partly as a result of extensive worldwide changes in land use, and scientists are often called upon by policy makers and managers to predict the ecological consequences that these alterations will have for stream ecosystems. The effects of the urbanization of stream ecosystems in the United States over the next 20 years are of particular concern. To address this issue, we present a multidisciplinary research agenda designed to improve our forecasting of the effects of land-use change on stream ecosystems. Currently, there are gaps in both our knowledge and the data that make it difficult to link the disparate models used by economists, hydrologists, geomorphologists, and ecologists. We identify a number of points that practitioners in each discipline were not comfortable compromising on—for example, by assuming an average condition for a given variable. We provide five instructive examples of the limitations to our ability to forecast the fate of stream and riverine ecosystems one drawn from each modeling step: (a) Accurate economic methods to forecast land-use changes over long periods (such as 20 years) are not available, especially not at spatially explicit scales; (b) geographic data are not always available at the appropriate resolution and are not always organized in categories that are hydrologically, ecologically, or economically meaningful; (c) the relationship between low flows and land use is sometimes hard to establish in anthropogenically affected catchments; (d) bed mobility, suspended sediment load, and channel form—all of which are important for ecological communities in streams—are difficult to predict; and (e) species distributions in rivers are not well documented, and the data that do exist are not always publicly available or have not been sampled at accurate scales, making it difficult to model ecological responses to specified levels of environmental change. Meeting these challenges will require both interdisciplinary cooperation and a reviewed commitment to intradisciplinary research in the fields of economics, geography, quantitative spatial analysis, hydrology, geomorphology, and ecology.

Both Sides Now

Both Sides Now

Promoting Sustainable Extension Approaches: Farmer Field School (FFS) and its role in sustainable agricultural development in Africa

This paper discusses the concept of Farmer Field School and its role in a multidisciplinary research agenda for sustainable agriculture in Africa. The FFS as a group learning approach builds knowledge and capacity among farmers to enable them diagnose their problems, identify solutions and develop plans and implement them with or without support from outside. The paper suggests that a multi-disciplinary research agenda that will not only aim at technology development but will also seek ways of stakeholder participation in technology development, validation and dissemination. It concludes that this approach will not only increase agricultural productivity, it will also lead to sustainable agriculture in Africa. [IJARD Vol.3 2002: 46-53]

A multidisciplinary research agenda for stroke rehabilitation

The practice of evidence-based health care is founded upon evidence-based research, which needs to be reliable, accessible and relevant if it is to be useful. In this study, health-care professionals and researchers collaborated to explore the clinical problems or questions perceived by health-care professionals in stroke rehabilitation and to prioritize these questions.

Linking environmental agents and autoimmune disease: an agenda for future research.

Autoimmune diseases are influenced by multiple factors including genetics, age, gender, reproductive status, hormones, and potential environmental contaminants. A workshop, "Linking Environmental Agents and Autoimmune Diseases," was convened at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 1-3 September 1998, to review current knowledge about links between environmental exposures and autoimmune disease, to identify and prioritize research needs, and to develop an integrated, multidisciplinary research agenda. Participants spent the last half-day of the workshop in small group discussions for the purpose of developing consensus on research needs. Research needs identified were a) develop research tools needed to explore links between environmental agents and autoimmune disease; b) establish a disease registry or surveillance system; c) develop and validate strategies for screening chemicals for the potential to induce or exacerbate autoimmune disease; d) develop an emergency response strategy to gain information from accidental exposures; and e) conduct hypothesis-driven research in occupationally exposed groups and/or in experimental animals. There was consensus that meetings like this workshop and projects that facilitate interactions between specialties should be encouraged. A multidisciplinary approach is needed to address this problem.

The dilemma concerning the nurse's role in a multidisciplinary research agenda

The dilemma concerning the nurse's role in a multidisciplinary research agenda

Discussion

Decades of space policy research have yielded an eclectic, multidisciplinary research agenda replete with findings that are relevant for theory and policy. Absent from the literature, however, is a systematic review and discussion of the data and research methods used to ascertain these findings. This is important for research progress because data and method choice have implications for the validity of the findings, potential contributions to theory, and efficacy of suggested policy prescriptions. Motivated by advances in computational social science, this article reviews the quantitative space policy literature and finds scope for further development with respect to data sources, method selection, and substantive topics of inquiry. Given these findings, two methodological areas are introduced, namely text and network analysis, and their utility is illustrated through an extension of a previous public opinion study, as well as a novel application regarding state support for international space law. This review might be relevant to scholars and practitioners interested in the empirical study of space policy.

Treatment interference in acutely and critically ill adults

To examine the state of knowledge of treatment interference, the self-removal of technological devices, in acutely or critically ill adults and to propose a multidisciplinary research agenda to further understanding of this clinical problem. A combined computerized and hand search of the nursing and medical literature (MEDLINE, 1966 to June 1996; Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, 1985 to June 1996; and holdings at the Center for the Study of Nursing History at the University of Pennsylvania) was conducted. Literature on specific technological devices and articles that contained the terms self-removal, withdrawal, devices, self-extubation, unplanned extubation, and involuntary treatment were searched. Literature on treatment interference was found in four main topic areas: (1) maintaining treatment, (2) unplanned extubation, (3) disruption or manipulation of a medical device, and (4) involuntary treatment. The results clearly establish the clinical importance of treatment interference and underscore the multidisciplinary and multifactorial nature of this perplexing, life-threatening clinical problem. Future research on treatment interference should emphasize systematically building an understanding of the processes involved, including patients' attributes, behavioral cues, and consequences, to develop appropriate multidisciplinary strategies to prevent patients' self-removal of technological devices.

Category management in the food industry: a research agenda

Discusses the research opportunities brought about by the adoption of category management in the food industry and suggests reasons why category management might be of interest to academics. Reviews contemporary research and proposes a multidisciplinary research agenda which crosses the academic‐industrial interface. Suggests four principal research themes: beneficiaries and benefits of category management; the process of organizational change; the management of categories; and the implications of category management adoption. Discusses these themes in the context of research already undertaken and details areas meriting closer investigation.

Tourism marketing images of industrial cities

This paper examines the extent to which, and why, places project either similar or different images in their tourism marketing. Specific consideration is given to the similarities and differences in the place images for tourism marketing used by five old industrial English cities: Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, Sheffield, and Stoke-on-Trent. It is found that, while there was some standardization in their overall marketing imagery, there were also significant differences. Consideration is also given to some of the influences shaping the images projected by these cities using insights from geographical studies, marketing, and critical sociology. An integrated, multidisciplinary research agenda is outlined for future work on city tourism images.

Social and Behavioural Research on Ageing: an Agenda for the United States

ABSTRACTIn this commentary on recent planning for multidisciplinary research on ageing in the United States, we argue that Sir Douglas Black's pessimistic conclusion about the irrelevance of such planning is off the mark. Created by the U.S. Congress in 1975, the National Institute on Ageing (NIA) was a novelty in the National Institutes of Health. NIA was mandated to have a broadly multidisciplinary research agenda that included behavioural and social sciences and to produce periodic reports to the Congress on a consensual agenda for future research. Two previous research agendas were developed internally by NIA. The recently released third agenda, which is of interest here, was organized externally by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences. While the subagendas in ageing research for basic biology, clinical medicine, and health services research will be of interest to some, the focus here is specifically on the behavioural and social scientific agenda. High priority substantive issues were identified. Beyond the building of a consensus concerning research priorities, other functions of national research planning are identified in the field of ageing.

Evolution of Organizational Cultures as Selection by Consequences

Terns, concepts, and theories from biology, cultural anthropology, and behavior analysis are integrated to explain the evolution of organizational cultural practices. The universal concept in all Wee disciplines is natural selection by consequences as a causal mode which accounts for behavior of individuals, groups of people, and births and deaths of entire organizational cultures. These selection processes provide a theoretical framework which suggests a multidisciplinary research agenda.