Disciplinary is a term used to describe types of knowledge, expertise, skills, people, projects, communities, problems, challenges, studies, inquiry, approaches, and research areas that are strongly associated with academic areas of study (academic disciplines) or areas of professional practice (profession). For example, the phenomenon of gravitation is strongly associated with academic discipline of physics, and so gravitation is considered to be part of the disciplinary knowledge of physics.
Crossdisciplinary refers to knowledge that explains aspects of one discipline in terms of another. Common examples of crossdisciplinary approaches are studies of the physics of music or the politics of literature.
It describes any method, project and research activity that examines a subject outside the scope of its own discipline without cooperation or integration from other relevant disciplines. In crossdisciplinarity, topics are studied using foreign methodologies of unrelated disciplines, for example Ethics in clinical research and occupational health.It is distinctly different from Interdisciplinarity because of the relationship that the disciplines share. Within a crossdisciplinary relationship disciplinary boundaries are crossed but no techniques or ideals are exchanged while Interdisciplinary relationships blend the practices and assumptions of each discipline involved.
Interdisciplinarity involves the combining of two or more academic fields into one single discipline. An interdisciplinary field crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged.
Originally the term interdisciplinary is applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that use methods and insights of several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. Interdisciplinarity involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies - along with their specific perspectives - in the pursuit of a common task. The epidemiology of AIDS or global warming require understanding of diverse disciplines to solve neglected problems. Interdisciplinary may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example,women's studies or ethnic area studies.Transdisciplinary refers to knowledge that exists in every individual, thus eliminating the need for discipline boundaries.
A transdisciplinary community or project is made up of transdisciplinary professionals, which is an ideal that can only be approached and not actually achieved in practice. To exist in today's society, a transdisciplinary professional would possess certification or degrees in all disciplines as well as experience in all professions. In essence, a truly transdisciplinary person contains all the distributed knowledge of the people in the community or project as their individual common knowledge. Furthermore, they exist within a community of people that share that knowledge. A transdisciplinary community is one in which common knowledgeof individuals and the distributed knowledge of the collective are identical.
Transdisciplinarity has two common meanings:
I)German Usage
-In German speaking countries, it refers to integration of diverse forms of research, and includes specific methods for relating scientific knowledge in problem-solving. A 2003 conference held in Göttingen showcased the diverse meanings of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity and made suggestions for converging them without eliminating present usages
II)Wider Usage
-Transdisciplinarity is also used to signify a unity of knowledge beyond disciplines
Qualitative research is a method of inquiry employed in many different academic disciplines, traditionally in the social sciences, but also in market research and further contexts.Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often needed than large samples.
Ethnography Research is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of sociocultural phenomena. Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not necessarily geographic, considering also work, leisure, and other communities), selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. Such informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community, using chain sampling to obtain a saturation of informants in all empirical areas of investigation. Informants are interviewed multiple times, using information from previous informants to elicit clarification and deeper responses upon re-interview. This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study. These subjective but collective understandings on a subject (ex., stratification) are often interpreted to be more significant than objective data (ex., income differentials).
