Interdisciplinary health research: perspectives from a process evaluation research team

Interdisciplinary health research (IDHR) is increasingly encouraged and is often a specific requirement for research grants provided by health research funding councils worldwide. There is consensus that research expertise and scholarship from a diverse range of disciplines are necessary to examine questions relating to complex health and social concerns for which single disciplinary approaches have been found inadequate. This paper reports on the experiences of an interdisciplinary process evaluation research team working in the field of stroke care. Realising the perceived benefits is less than straightforward; setting up and conducting IDHR can present researchers with a range of challenges at a strategic, practical and individual level. We identify how differences in disciplinary perspectives and skills impacted on our research practice. Whilst initially challenging, our different approaches to the research problem and the methods to address it, expanded conceptual and methodological understanding and proved of benefit for the research team and the study outputs.