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Building strong research associations Interdisciplinarity, theory-building, and policy in politics and the life sciences and health services research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

William P. Brandon
William P. Brandon*
Affiliation:
Metrolina Medical Foundation Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, Department of Political Science, UNC Charlotte, 9201 University Blvd, Charlotte, NC 28223. wilbrand@uncc.edu
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Extract

This essay explores efforts to establish interdisciplinary research associations by comparing two organizations that were founded in the early 1980s. One has focused on the field of politics and the life sciences and the other on health services research. Both are involved in securing recognition for a research area—or “field of research”—that had not previously been conceptualized as a coherent academic or professional enterprise. The motivation for this paper is my interest in politics and the life sciences (the field), the organization—the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that was established in 1980 to foster scholarly study of the field—and its journal Politics and the Life Sciences. (For the sake of clarity I adopt the convention of signifying a field entirely in lower-case orthography, beginning an organizational name with capital letters and naming the related journals in italics.)

Type
Founders' Forum
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 56 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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