Abstract
Funding agencies in Canada are attempting to break down the organizational boundaries between disciplines to promote interdisciplinary research and foster the integration of the social sciences into the health research field. This paper explores the extent to which biomedical and clinician scientists’ perceptions of social science research operate as a cultural boundary to the inclusion of social scientists into this field. Results indicated that cultural boundaries may impede social scientists’ entry into the health research field through three modalities: (1) biomedical and clinician scientists’ unfavourable and ambivalent posture towards social science research; (2) their opposition to a resource increase for the social sciences; and (3) clinician scientists procedural assessment criteria for social science. The paper also discusses the merits and limitations of Tom Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work for studying social dynamics within the field of science.
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Notes
We preferred the designation ‘clinician scientists’ to ‘clinical scientists’ because clinicians’ research activities are not restricted to clinical research, such as clinical trials and case reports, and may include activities intersecting to some degree either with social science or basic science.
We acknowledge that the biomedical and clinical sciences differ significantly in the methods they use and the goal of their scientific endeavor (see Knorr-Cetina 1999, on scientific cultures in basic sciences). We took into account these differences when relevant. However, for the purpose of this paper we decided to consider biomedical and clinical sciences together for two reasons: (1) both are grounded on the premise that the experimental method epitomizes legitimate research procedure; (2) both occupy a dominant position in the health research field, and thus possess the power to act as the arbiter of legitimate science.
For most clinician scientists, social science primarily refers to qualitative research. This perception may be due, in part, to the massive increase of articles using qualitative methods published in clinical journals in recent years (Eakin and Mykhalovskiy 2003). Several clinician scientists in our study also said themselves that they associate social science with qualitative research.
Member checking refers to the verification of the findings with the research participants themselves to confirm their accuracy.
Peer debriefing refers to the process of conferring throughout the study with a colleague who is not involved in the study but who has relevant expertise.
Audit trail refers to the keeping of a record of all decisions made by the researcher to make it possible for an outside reviewer to repeat each stage of the research including the analysis.
Our anticipation that some readers of this paper—predominantly social scientists—may be unfamiliar with some of these methodological tools attests to the disconnect between the predominant conception of “good” social science among clinician scientists and what researchers trained in the social sciences actually do and define as good science.
The criteria were: (1) “Was the analysis repeated by more than one researcher to ensure reliability?” (triangulation); (2) “Could the evidence be inspected independently by others; if relevant, could the process of transcription be independently inspected?” (audit trail); (3) “Was the sampling strategy theoretically comprehensive to ensure the generalisability of the conceptual analyses?” (purposive sampling); (4) “Did the investigator make use of quantitative evidence to test qualitative conclusions where appropriate?” (triangulation) (Mays and Pope 1995: 112).
For an insightful analysis of the procedural approach to social science assessment in medicine and its potential impact on social science research in health, see Eakin and Mykhalovskiy (2003).
A position predominantly held by biomedical scientists.
A position predominantly held by clinician scientists.
The ranking of RCTs and similar statistical-based research is the only issue about which we noticed some level of disagreement between biomedical and clinician scientists. Whereas clinician scientists perceive RCT as being equal to laboratory research in terms of the validity of its results and its methodological rigour, biomedical scientists tended to rank it lower than laboratory research because it can only establish statistical relationship between variables. Despite this difference of opinion about RCT, our data clearly show that clinician scientists don’t dispute the fact that experimental method represents the gold standard of scientific research. For a historical analysis of the relationship between laboratory science and statistical-based research, see Amsterdamska (2005).
Exploring the reasons why ambivalent biomedical and clinician scientists don’t want to reject social science from the scientific field is beyond the scope of this paper. However, we may hypothesise that some of them have been exposed to social science research and have developed, to a certain degree, an openness to it (Albert et al. 2008).
At the time of the study, approximately 18% of the peer-review committees at the CIHR (10 of 54) had some expertise for assessing social science research projects. Although these committees were not specifically devoted to social science, they included at least one panelist with some acquaintance with social science.
Although this respondent was classified as receptive, the receptiveness score he was attributed is 3.8, which places him at the lower end of the receptive respondent category (see Fig. 1). His low score among the receptive category may explain why he/she tends to show some reservation about social science as the ambivalent respondents did.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, grant # KTE-72140. The authors wish to thank Jeannine Banack, Wendy McGuire, and Sarah White for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Anne-Julie Houle for her help in coordinating the project.
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Appendix
Appendix
Questions used to construct the receptiveness score
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“Many health researchers believe that there is a hierarchy of research methods, which is determined by the methodology’s rigor. Do you agree that there is this hierarchy? Explain.”
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“Some researchers think that qualitative research (such as studies using interviews or focus groups) is mainly to be used in the preliminary phases of quantitative research. Do you agree that this should be the primary use of qualitative methods? Explain.”
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“Do you think that there are more sources of bias within the social sciences than in the experimental sciences or is it equal? Explain.”
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“Do you think the fact that the social sciences (or qualitative research) are subject to a greater number of bias compromises the validity of their results? Explain.”
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“The British Medical Journal has proposed a checklist to assess the scientific value of qualitative studies in the health sciences (Mays and Pope 1995). In the box below, 5 of these criteria are listed. Please give me your opinion on each of them. Do you think these are appropriate criteria for assessing qualitative research?” Our analysis has only scored the following 5th criterion: “Did the investigator make use of quantitative evidence to test qualitative conclusions where appropriate? Explain.”
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Albert, M., Laberge, S. & Hodges, B.D. Boundary-Work in the Health Research Field: Biomedical and Clinician Scientists’ Perceptions of Social Science Research. Minerva 47, 171–194 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9120-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9120-8