Building Transdisciplinary Research Teams to Study Women's Health Disparities across Legal, Economic, and Social Welfare Domains: Lessons Shared from the Formative Journey

Background: Increasingly, scientific funding agencies are requiring that researchers move toward an integrated, transdisciplinary team science paradigm, which is qualitatively different from multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches.  While the barriers to and rewards of conducting this type of research have been discussed extensively in the literature, specific examples of how nurse investigators have led these teams to reconcile the differences in theoretical, methodological, and/or analytic perspectives that inevitably exist are lacking. 

Description: In this presentation, we describe these developmental trajectory challenges through a case study of one transdisciplinary team.  This is discussed within the context of literature that has provided guidance for building transdisciplinary teams, where team member characteristics and the leadership tasks associated with the successful launching and maintenance of teams over time.  

Lessons Learned:  Addressing challenges related to theory integration, methods application, and analytic perspectives proved quite difficult -- particularly across the economics disciplinary perspective and researchers on the team with nursing, social work, and public health-oriented biostatistics backgrounds.  Overcoming these challenges, however, has been essential to examining the complex, and potentially cumulative effects that key intersections between legal, social welfare, and labor market systems may have on the health of disadvantaged women.  

Implications/Recommendations:  Many of the characteristics and tasks needed to engage in transdisciplinary research are very familiar to public health nurses, which make nurse scientists with backgrounds in public health extremely well-suited to lead these teams.  The rewards of persevering to overcome expected challenges can lead to significant breakthroughs in understanding, and examining, phenomena in novel ways.