Walking at the edge of social and biomedical sciences: a fascina ng yet tricky trek!

Complex health problems call for interdisciplinarity. However, major divides remain between disciplines, resulting in projects being split into work-packages, mostly running in silos. This communication considers lessons learnt by scientists experiencing for more than a decade interdisciplinary research. It proposes a framework for further analysis and calls for dialogue to increase added value of interdisciplinarity with a focus on social sciences and biomedical sciences. Indeed, these disciplines handle distinct topics, adopting disciplinary viewpoints requiring very different temporal and spatial scales of study. Hereafter we consider some general and common, though disputable and not exclusive, distinctions between social and natural sciences. The gaps between qualitative or quantitative research processes are a recurrent barrier. Hence, the necessary dialogue remains challenged by the diversity of practices, beliefs and epistemologies. Social sciences mostly rely on a constructivist, inductive and interpretative approach, while biomedicine provides experimental facts based on hypothetico-deductivist methods, and modeling and statistical approaches call for mathematical translation and analysis of reality. Often, debates crystalize around the conception of quality in science. Qualitative research addresses meaning, implying subjective interpretation of data collected within a defined context. On the other hand, quantitative approaches call for representativity of samples to generalize results to populations. Also, experimental science will focus on statistical significance and repeatability within controlled conditions to decontextualize knowledge. Therefore, disciplines diverge about the aptness of truth assessment, the perceived usefulness of knowledge and importance of research questions. Tradeoffs need to be made between reductionism and holism, addressing the various scales of study of disciplines. Further fostered by technical jargons and evolving conceptual frameworks, this misunderstanding leads to severe shortfalls in collaborations. Beyond the sharing of experience, a rigorous analysis of barriers, benefiting from insights from philosophy of science, is needed in order to get more value from interdisciplinary collaboration.
Research impact highlights: Interdisciplinary research is needed to address complex health problems. Yet, major gaps are dividing disciplines, based on profound epistemological divergences. This causes major shortfalls in projects joining social and biomedical sciences. Based on the sharing of experience gained through participation to interdisciplinary research in diverse contexts, the present communication aims at proposing a reflection integrating insights from philosophy of science to propose further analysis and ways forward.