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Author's personal copy hand, were greater in the ID-SURE group. Fellows exposed to the ID-SURE program (M4.8) showed increased interdisciplinary activities as measured by the BCCAI by the end of the training program compared to nonfellows: M3.4, F(1,117)28.13, p0.001. Hypothesis 5 was that ID-SURE training developed in students a transdisciplinary orientation toward working in teams and an appreciation of interdisciplinary concepts and methods. The TPPS, SCS, and the IDSAI were all positively associated with the BCCAI, as shown in Table 2. Further, the TPPS, SCS, and IDSAI at Time 1 all significantly predicted the BCCAI at Time 3, p0.001. The LIS did not predict changes in interdisciplinary behaviors. Qualitative Analyses Whereas measures of team participation, social climate, laboratory impressions, and appreciation of interdisciplinary science were indirect measures of attitudes that could predict future involvement in interdisciplinary research careers, qualitative focus group interviews revealed more about future intentions of the ID-SURE students. An important theme that emerged from the qualitative interviews was that working in a multidisciplinary team is enjoyable. This finding is consistent with the positive and significant correlation of the TPPS and the process measures of interdisciplinary perspectives and attitudes found in the quantitative analyses. In addition to the opportunity to interact with students from different majors and learn about fields other than their own, students appreciated the lectures on interdisciplinary theories, research methods, and ethics. When asked about the things they learned from the ID-SURE program, several students commented that the experience “broadened their view of science,” “opened their mind to new horizons,” and allowed them to “look at a problem from other viewpoints.” Several students expressed their interest in working as part of an interdisciplinary research team or on collaborative projects in the future. These findings corroborate the significant cumulative impact of the training program on students’ interdisciplinary perspectives and behaviors, as evidenced by the longitudinal survey data. Discussion This study offers evidence for the efficacy of the ID- SURE program for training undergraduate students in transdisciplinary concepts, methods, and skills that are needed for effective scientific collaboration. A positive relationship was found between the Interdisciplinary Scientific Appreciation Index (IDSAI) and the TPPS. It is not clear whether appreciation of interdisciplinary collaboration preceded, or resulted from, students’ participation in the collaborative team project. However, interview results suggest that working as part of a team was an influential and valued part of the ID-SURE curriculum. These findings suggest that interdisciplinary training programs should incorporate team projects as a required curricular component, at least for those programs geared toward undergraduate students. This study contributes to the development and evaluation of interdisciplinary health research training programs in several respects. First, it presents and evaluates a novel curriculum for training undergraduate students in interdisciplinary theories, concepts, and methods of health promotion that can be replicated in other settings and contexts. Second, it provides and tests the reliability of new measures for evaluating interdisciplinary collaborative processes, including the BCCAI, the IPI, the TPPS, the LIS, the SCS, and the IDSAI. In addition, objective criteria for rating the integrative and intellectual quality of students’ research products were developed and evaluated as outcome measures of interdisciplinarity. These product measures can be used in future studies to assess the effects of curricular or other training strategies that are intended to strengthen transdisciplinary research orientations and scientific collaboration. Notably, students participating in the ID-SURE program effectively increased the frequency of their interdisciplinary collaborative activities, as measured by the BCCAI scale over the course of the training program. The ID-SURE fellows were also compared with non–ID- SURE fellows on the BCCAI measure. Results showed that interdisciplinary collaborative behaviors were significantly higher among the former group at the conclusion of the fellowship period. Thus, the ID-SURE curriculum appears to have been effective at instilling interdisciplinary perspectives that in turn led to a greater frequency and variety of interdisciplinary behaviors. No significant differences were found between ID- SURE fellows and nonfellows on the IPI at the conclusion of their training period or in the integrative quality of their research products. This finding raises important questions, such as whether the nonfellows had an informal, unstructured interdisciplinary experience during their fellowship. A substantial number of nonfellows were engaged in research with mentor/s in disciplines other than their own. The interaction between the mentors and fellows may have encouraged interdisciplinary perspectives that were reflected in the final projects of the nonfellows. Whereas ID-SURE fellows had the experience of engaging in some interdisciplinary collaborative behaviors such as participating in an interdisciplinary team project, reading articles outside their major, and attending lectures in other disciplines, the nonfellows were not exposed to those curricular opportunities. This difference might explain the significant differ- 364 American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 36, Number 4 www.ajpm-online.net
Author's personal copy ences in collaborative activities but not in interdisciplinary perspectives and inter-rater assessments of the integrative quality of research products, among participants in ID-SURE relative to those in the other fellowship programs. A significant positive relationship was found between mentor interdisciplinary perspectives and behaviors and those of their fellows. In terms of both attitudes (e.g., interdisciplinary perspectives) and actual behaviors (e.g., indexes of behavior change), fellows appear to model their mentors. These findings highlight the substantial influence of scholarly role models on the development of students’ research orientations and activities. Thus, the two facets of the ID-SURE training program that were found to exert greatest influence on the development of students’ collaborative research skills and transdisciplinary orientations were their faculty mentors and their participation in a collaborative interdisciplinary team project over the course of the fellowship period. This study was designed to elucidate the processes and outcomes of a new curriculum strategy designed to promote interdisciplinary research orientations and behaviors in undergraduate scholars. Whereas further research is required to better understand the components of an effective interdisciplinary training program, the findings from this study provide a conceptual and empirical foundation for that inquiry. We gratefully acknowledge support for this manuscript provided by the NIH Roadmap Interdisciplinary Training Grant No. 15R13DK69500-03. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor-in-chief for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. No financial disclosures were reported by the authors of this paper. References 1. National Academy of Sciences. Facilitating interdisciplinary research. Washington DC: The National Academies Press, 2005. 2. Lattuca LR. Creating interdisciplinarity. Nashville TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. 3. Nash J. Transdisciplinary training programs: key components and prerequisites for success. Am J Prev Med 2008;35(2S):S133–S140. 4. Nash JM, Collins BN, Loughlin SE, et al. Training the transdisciplinary scientist: a general framework applied to tobacco use behavior. Nicotine Tob Res 2003;5:S41–S53. 5. Stokols D, Hall KL, Taylor B, Moser RP. The science of team science: overview of the field and introduction to the supplement. Am J Prev Med 2008;35(2S):S77–S89. 6. Younglove-Webb J, Gray B, Abdalla CW, Purvis Thurow A. The dynamics of multidisciplinary research teams in academia. The review of higher education 1999;22:425–40. 7. Rosenfield PL. The potential of transdisciplinary research for sustaining and extending linkages between the health and social sciences. Soc Sci Med 1992;35:1343–57. 8. Mitrany M, Stokols D. Gauging the transdisciplinary qualities and outcomes of doctoral training programs. J Plan Educ Res 2005;24: 437–49. 9. Klein JT. Crossing boundaries: knowledge, disciplines, and interdisciplinarities. Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996. 10. Stokols D, Harvey R, Gress J, Fuqua J, Phillips K. In vivo studies of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration: lessons learned and implications for active living research. Am J Prev Med 2005;28(2S2):202–13. 11. Stokols D, Misra S, Hall K, Taylor B, Moser R. The ecology of team science: understanding contextual influences on transdisciplinary collaboration. Am J Prev Med 2008;35(2S):S96–S115. 12. Cohen J. A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educ Psychol Meas 1960;20:37–46. 13. Cronbach LJ. Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika 1951;163:297–334. 14. Hall K, Stokols D, Moser R, et al. The collaboration readiness of transdisciplinary research teams and centers: findings from the National Cancer Institute TREC baseline evaluation study. Am J Prev Med 2008;35(2S): S161–S172. 15. Stokols D, Fuqua J, Gress J, et al. Evaluating transdisciplinary science. Nicotine Tob Res 2003;5:S21–S29. 16. Osgood CE, Suci G, Tannenbaum P. The measurement of meaning. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1967. 17. Schafer JL, Olsen MK. Multiple imputation for multivariate missing-data problems: a data analyst’s perspective. Multivariate Behav Res 1998;33:545–71. 18. Tukey JW. The future of data analysis. Ann Math Statist 1962;33:1–67. April 2009 Am J Prev Med 2009;36(4) 365
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