Paper short abstract:

We conducted dialogues among participants from different disciplines and proposed a method to visualize knowledge integration in the dialogues. The proposed method aims to understand the integration of perspectives and identify the factor of consensus building in the dialogues.

Paper long abstract:

Interdisciplinary research is expected to solve complex societal problems by integrating the perspectives of multiple disciplines. We conducted dialogues among participants from different disciplines and proposed a method to visualize knowledge integration in the dialogues. This study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively understand the integration of perspectives from various disciplines by analyzing networks between ideas in the dialogues.

We conducted ten workshops on interdisciplinary dialogues from September 2021 to October 2022, and investigated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Most of the participants were graduate students and early career researchers, and they engaged in group dialogues under the moderation of group facilitators, divided into groups of about 5 to 6 participants. In the workshops, all participants present their opinions on the topic of each workshop before and after the group dialogues. In the reflection phase after the dialogues, each participant drew lines between the ideas in the dialogues and confirmed the influence of the other participants in forming their thinking during the dialogues.

We analyzed the ideas connected by lines as networks to understand how participants changed their thinking and which ideas were influential during the dialogues. From the result of the pre-analysis, we observed the structural difference of the networks between the groups (Ohki et al., 2022 [in Japanese]). In addition to network analysis, we identified the factor of knowledge integration among different disciplines during the dialogues using qualitative text analysis. Based on the findings, we discuss a possible application of the proposed method to interdisciplinary research management.