Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Purpose: Interdisciplinarity, defined as a perspective advocating the combination of different discipline-based theoretical and methodological approaches to education and knowledge development to achieve coherent and integrated educational and knowledge outcomes, currently is widely emphasized both as a requisite programmatic feature of privately and publicly supported research, and as a highly desirable feature of university-based undergraduate and graduate training programs. Significantly, the validity of claims about value added by interdisciplinarity have been subject to little empirical investigation. The research reported here aims to compensate for this limitation to some degree by examining the extent to which a strong interdisciplinarity orientation in doctoral education in social work is associated with differences in the scholarly orientation and productivity of graduates, compared to graduates of more conventional social work and social science doctoral programs.

Methods: The study population comprised three samples of PhD graduates -graduates of five interdisciplinary “PhD plus” programs, which require graduates to satisfy the conditions of acquiring a PhD in both social work and a social science discipline, a comparison group of social work/social welfare graduates, and a reference group of social science graduates. Each group numbered 108. Data describing numbers of publications, citations, grants and research domains referenced were acquired from online databases; these data were used to measure different dimensions of graduates' scholarly orientation and performance. The observation period was 1984 to 2002; analyses focusing on the period 1989 to 2002, and was carried out using various procedures, including t-tests, Poisson regression and regression transformations.

Findings: Compared to graduates of more conventional forms of doctoral education, particularly in social work, graduates of interdisciplinary doctoral education programs demonstrate a more generalist scholarly orientation, contribute across a broader range of research domains, and have significantly higher levels of scholarly and research productivity.

Implications: The findings of this research have several implications. First, a plausible explanation of why graduates of interdisciplinary “PhD plus” programs demonstrate significant differences in their scholarly orientation and productivity, compared to conventionally trained social work graduates, is that the knowledge and research they produce may be more theoretical and therefore have greater generality, giving it a competitive advantage for publication and intellectual influence over potentially less theoretical and more applied forms of knowledge. Additional research is required to test this hypothesis. Relatedly, important questions are raised about the purpose of doctoral education in social work. Second, although not authoritative, the results suggest the possibility of developing norms for use in decision-making about tenure and promotion in university settings, based on the use of publication and citation data. Third, the comparatively weaker influence and lower productivity of social work graduates, compared to interdisciplinary and social science graduates, points to the importance of continuing to develop infrastructure supportive of scholarship and research in social work. Finally, assessments of the strength of the design of this study vary depending on the theory of learning used to interpret the findings. This implies the importance of additional research incorporating both qualitative and quantitative data, as well as multilevel approaches to analysis.