Interdisciplinary promises versus practices in medicine: the decoupled experiences of social sciences and humanities scholars.
This paper explores social scientists' and humanities (SSH) scholars' integration within the academic medical research environment. Three questions guided our investigation: Do SSH scholars adapt to the medical research environment? How do they navigate their career within a culture that may be inconsistent with their own? What strategies do they use to gain legitimacy? The study builds on three concepts: decoupling, doxa, and epistemic habitus. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with SSH scholars working in 11 faculties of medicine across Canada. Participants were selected through purposeful and snowball sampling. The data were analyzed by thematic content analysis. For most of our participants, moving into medicine has been a challenging experience, as their research practices and views of academic excellence collided with those of medicine. In order to achieve some level of legitimacy more than half of our participants altered their research practices. This resulted in a dissonance between their internalized appreciation of academic excellence and their new, altered, research practices. Only six participants experienced no form of challenge or dissonance after moving into medicine, while three decided to break with their social science and humanities past and make the medical research community their new home. We conclude that the work environment for SSH scholars in faculties of medicine does not deliver on the promise of inclusiveness made by calls for interdisciplinarity in Canadian health research.
['Albert|Mathieu|M|', 'Paradis|Elise|E|', 'Kuper|Ayelet|A|']
D035843:Biomedical Research D002170:Canada D005178:Faculty D005260:Female D006809:Humanities D006801:Humans D058025:Interdisciplinary Studies D007407:Interviews as Topic D008297:Male D012942:Social Sciences
Medicine Decoupling Social sciences Humanities Research Canada Interdisciplinarity Bourdieu