Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council is currently working with faculty at the University of California at San Francisco to develop a novel pilot doctoral program in transdisciplinary health policy (TDHP). The joint UCSF-SSRC exercise offers an ambitious, rare, and highly promising opportunity to build a rigorous yet efficient doctoral path for students who seek to draw on core training in a social science discipline to pursue leading-edge transdisciplinary collaborative research careers in health policy. The program will support and strengthen opportunities for students to pursue interdisciplinary health policy research careers in a variety of settings outside of traditional tenure track positions at universities. These environments include interdisciplinary research institutes and programs, government agencies, and not-for-profit and private organizations where innovative health policy research is conducted. Click here for more background information.

The new TDHP program departs from the observation that health policy research is most effective when it is powerful and incisive enough to inform critical decision-making in diverse environments-be they clinical, organizational, or legislative. It is thus vital that graduates of health policy doctoral programs be able to formulate, evaluate, and critique research from multiple perspectives; that they be comfortable drawing on a wide range of approaches and literatures in their collaborative work; and that they recognize the plurality of values and perspectives that inform it.

In embracing the inherently transdisciplinary nature of health policy research, the new program nonetheless also recognizes that it is impossible to incorporate within a single trainee the full depth of knowledge in multiple fields necessary to do outstanding trans-disciplinary work. Rather, trainees must be provided with a firm grounding in one discipline but simultaneously learn to value and effectively partner with investigators trained in many other fields. The TDHP program will seek to meet this challenge by introducing a variety of training innovations:

• It is structured to provide both required doctoral coursework in a major social science discipline and focused, sustained cross-over training and collaboration in two or more additional fields-all within a single doctoral program to be completed in four to five years.
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• Students will be required to take core problem-oriented interdisciplinary seminars that ask them to bridge, translate, and evaluate alternative theoretical frameworks, methods, and assumptions from multiple traditions.
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• At the dissertation phase, the program will require that students collaborate with faculty or colleagues from two or more additional disciplines (distinct from the student's core social science discipline) and maintain progress notes documenting how they address challenges that emerge throughout the process.
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• The program will focus on recruiting and supporting trainees who plan to pursue policy-oriented research careers outside of traditional disciplinary departments. Throughout different stages of the program, faculty will provide additional guidance and resources to help students anticipate and plan for effective career development opportunities after graduating (including positions available in universities, public and private institutes, and government agencies).

The SSRC is providing research, guidance, and evaluation support to design and implement the new program. The SSRC's consultative role focuses on three major tasks: (1) a needs assessment of the most important challenges facing integrative doctoral training in health policy, including a review of existing programs; (2) the development of guidelines describing the qualifications, background, and professional interests of trainees who could most benefit and flourish in a new transdisciplinary program; and (3) the formulation of a monitoring and evaluation plan that will ensure continuous learning and improvement during pilot program implementation and provide insights for the benefit of other institutions, funders, and scholars concerned with the future of graduate training in health policy.

The SSRC's collaborative role in this project builds on the networks of knowledge and findings emerging from the activities of the Working Group on Integrative Doctoral Programs in the Health and Social Sciences, which concluded its work in August of 2004.

Funding for SSRC's participation in this effort has been provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.