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Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Insights from Angela Dale at the University of Manchester

Angela Dale from the University of Manchester shares her experiences with the Research Methods Programme (RMP), which fosters cross-disciplinary collaboration to address complex research questions. By utilizing innovative methodologies borrowed from diverse fields, the RMP explores impactful societal issues such as locality's influence on voting and relationship dynamics among cohabiting couples. This comprehensive approach to interdisciplinary research emphasizes the importance of evaluating policy interventions, understanding causal relationships, and broadening disciplinary perspectives to enhance social science outcomes.

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Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Insights from Angela Dale at the University of Manchester

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  1. Crossing disciplinary boundaries Angela Dale University of Manchester

  2. Experiences from RMP • RMP brought together cross-disciplinary teams that developed methods to answer difficult research questions: • What is the impact of locality on an individual’s likelihood of voting, being poor, being unemployed? • Are cohabiting couples more likely to marry if they plan to have a child? Or does being pregnant precipitate marriage?

  3. Methods that cross disciplines • Borrowing methods from other disciplines: • Optimal matching analysis, used to analyse sequences (eg job histories) has borrowed from DNA sequencing • Sharing methods across disciplines • Social Network Analysis, used in many disciplines, but also similar methods in transport studies, ecology …

  4. Inter-disciplinarity to answer big questions Evaluation of a policy pilot • Typically a policy intervention will have many different aspects and may need different types of evaluation • Not just ‘does it work?’ but also how, why, and what are the other (unintended) consequences? • educational maintenance payment to 16-18s who stayed in FT education • Large survey and also qualitative work • To establish causality one needs to build up evidence and usually need different approaches (Cox and Wermuth, 2001)

  5. Concepts and theory: debating across disciplines • Benefits and challenges from taking a topic and exploring how to research it with colleagues from different disciplines • Requires you to think a lot harder about your own disciplinary beliefs • May help to remove stereotypes about another discipline • May raise some unexpected and valuable issues • Will definitely broaden one’s thinking

  6. Conclusion • Good social science requires crossing boundaries • Extends horizons • Challenges preconceptions • May give more certainty of explanation • May lead to innovation • And new friends!

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