3. Transdisciplinary Research Paradigms

What a paradigm actually is

A paradigm is more than a method. It is a set of commitments at three levels:

• Ontology — what kinds of things exist and are real
• Epistemology — how we come to know those things
• Methodology — what procedures follow from that knowing

Methods (a particular survey, a particular coding scheme) are downstream of the paradigm. You don't pick methods first; you pick a paradigm and let the methods follow. When researchers skip this step, they end up with methods that quietly carry commitments they never named.

A worked example. The choice "I'll measure adherence with a self-report scale" looks like a methods decision. But it carries ontological commitments (adherence is a real, stable property of an individual), epistemological commitments (people can accurately report their own behavior), and methodological commitments (numbers will represent the thing we care about). All of these can be challenged. A different paradigm might frame adherence as relational (a property of the patient-provider system) or as a narrative (a story patients tell about themselves). Each frame produces a different study.

The limits of PICO and SPIDER

Clinical and evidence-based-practice traditions use question frameworks like:

• PICO: Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome
• SPIDER: Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type

These are useful within their home paradigms. They presuppose a discrete population, a manipulable intervention, a clean comparator, a measurable outcome. They are not neutral frameworks. They are paradigm-specific frameworks that work brilliantly inside biomedicine and badly outside it.

Applied to a wicked problem — community trust in a public-health agency, the meaning of a stigmatized diagnosis — PICO forces the problem into a shape it doesn't fit. The "population" becomes a single demographic when the actual unit is relational. The "intervention" becomes the academic team's idea when the real intervention is a community negotiation. The "outcome" becomes whatever you can measure when what matters is contested.

The issue isn't that PICO is wrong; it's that PICO is a tool for one kind of problem. Use it where it fits; recognize when it doesn't.

Integrative research questions

A transdisciplinary research question typically does three things:

1. Admits more than one method by design. The verb makes room for multiple ways of knowing.
2. Includes a stakeholder-defined success criterion. Not just an academic outcome.
3. Names the population relationally. Not just an isolated unit.

A question that does all three is harder to write than it looks. Workshop your draft questions against these three criteria. A good integrative question reads as if multiple disciplines could see themselves in it.

Compare:

"Does mindfulness training reduce blood pressure in adults with hypertension?"

vs.

"How does mindfulness training shape both blood pressure and the lived experience of stress for adults with hypertension, and what does it mean to participants in the context of their daily lives?"

The first is a PICO question. The second admits clinical measurement and interpretive depth. Both are valid; the second is integrative.

Co-creating questions with communities

There's a difference between consulting a community and co-creating a question with them.

• Consultation: the academic team writes the question, then asks the community to react.
• Co-creation: question-formulation happens outside the academic team, often before grant submission, with community partners holding meaningful decision rights.

Co-creation is structurally harder. It requires time before funding, relationships before deliverables, and a willingness to follow the community's priorities even when they don't fit the funder's call. It is also the most important difference between rhetorical and real transdisciplinary work.

A practical pattern: a community-defined "long list" of questions, narrowed jointly with the academic team based on what's feasible to fund and what the community will benefit from. The narrowing conversation is the design step.

Questions that build bridges

A bridge-building question:

• Uses a verb that admits more than one method ("understand," "explore," "co-design") rather than one ("measure," "detect," "estimate")
• Has an outcome list that includes at least one stakeholder-defined endpoint
• Describes the population relationally — "mothers and the clinic nurses who serve them" rather than "mothers"
• Names the disciplines it bridges explicitly, not implicitly

A silo-reinforcing question:

• Uses a single-method verb
• Has only academic outcomes
• Treats the population as isolated
• Hides the discipline it sits within because it assumes that discipline's frame is universal

The exercise of rewriting silo questions as bridge questions is one of the most practical transdisciplinary skills. It also surfaces what you actually believe about evidence.

Closing

Paradigms aren't optional. They're the commitments that shape every downstream methodological choice. PICO is a paradigm-specific tool, not a universal one. Integrative questions admit multiple methods, stakeholder-defined success, and relational populations. Co-creation moves question-formulation outside the academic team.

Next: the dominant paradigms in mainstream science — positivism and post-positivism — and the theoretical frameworks that bridge across them.