Crossing Disciplinary and
Methodological Boundaries
Peter Halfpenny
Executive Director
National Centre for e-Social Science
NCRM Research Methods Festival
Oxford 30 June – 3 July 2008
Begin at the beginning
In the beginning …
Isidore Marie Auguste
François Xavier Comte
(1798 – 1857)
Social Physics –
later ‘Sociology’
Queen of the Sciences
- organised the lower sciences
- already ‘multi’
Sociology is multi
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Macro, micro, meso
Theoretical, empirical
Individual, institutions, societies
Causal, interpretive
Cases, samples, populations
Work, education, family, community, class,
gender, ethnicity, environment, health, crime,
media, consumption, art, science…
 -isms galore …
Social sciences are multi
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Sociology
Economics
Politics
Social Anthropology
Business Studies
Geography
Media Studies
and more …
Research methods are multi
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Festival programme!
69 sessions
23 ‘what is …? topics
Multimodal, archival, participatory, grounded,
agent-based, secondary, multi-level, visual,
ethnographic, longitudinal, comparative,
statistical, critical …
 social segregation, interview questions, risk,
ethics, population trends, social networks …
Boundaries everywhere
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Social sciences are
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multi-disciplinary
multi-method
Social sciences criss-crossed by boundaries
How to respond?
1. Erase them
2. Work within them
3. Work across them
1. Erase the boundaries
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Seek some overarching whole?
A dominant paradigm?
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A philosophical solution? 
Postmodernism
• seeking a solution is fruitless / misguided
2. Work within boundaries
 Focus narrowly by topic and method
 Advantages
• cumulation
 Disadvantages
• insular
• against the trend
3. Work across boundaries
 Increasing potential
• digital ‘data deluge’
• Internet enables collaboration
• computer support unlimited
 21st Century ‘grand challenges’
ESRC Key Challenges
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Succeeding in the global economy
Individual behaviour and its relationship to
biological and social determinants
Education for life
Environmental change
Security and international relations
Religion and society
Population change
ESRC Delivery Plan 2006 p.6
RCUK Interdisciplinary priorities
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Energy
Living with environmental change
Global threats to security
Ageing
Lifelong health and well-being
Digital economy
Nanoscience
Crossing boundaries
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Social sciences
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criss-crossed with boundaries
substantial experience of crossing boundaries
substantial incentives to cross boundaries
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realising the potential of the digital age
addressing key challenges
funding opportunities
Problems crossing boundaries
1. ecological fallacy
• multi at macro level not at micro level
• incentives to work in collaborative multi teams?
2. lack of synthesis
• how to integrate the multi bits?
Problems crossing boundaries
3. complex explanations
• how to understand multi explanations?
• from lone scholars to collaborative multi teams
4. lack of simple policy implications
• how to promote multi-agency policies?
Transcending boundaries
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Don’t reify boundaries
Focus on research questions
Pragmatic mixes of methods and disciplines
Creatively craft explanations that draw on
a wide range of evidence to illuminate the
research question at hand
… or is this a fudge?