Réflexions sur une expérience interdisciplinaire dans le cadre d’une recherche exploratoire

An exploratory case study was carried out on a population of family and social workers and nurses in a homecare service department in order (1) to identify the various constraints that cause their work to become a health risk ; (2) to study the strategies used to reduce the effect of these constraints ; and (3) to pay particular attention to any variations by worker age and experience. A combination of several methodological approaches was applied, namely health and population statistics, sociology of work and ageing, and ergonomics. This paper, based on a detailed analysis of two examples, presents an a posteriori reflection aimed at clarifying why this interdisciplinary combination appeared to be so appropriate and identifying its contributions to each discipline as well as the plus-value it produced. It was found that the interdisciplinary approach contributed at the level of research, in the form of general scientific spin-offs and progress in the individual disciplines, and at the level of the workplace, in the form of functional and other spin-offs affecting the dynamics of social change.