Interdisciplinary research: How it can improve impact, knowledge translation, engagement, and access to funding

Dr Marg Rogers (UNE), Dr Anwaar Ulhaq (Charles Sturt Univ.) School of Education Seminar 16 August 2023. The Australian Research Council is committed to ‘fostering excellence in research that traverses or transcends disciplinary boundaries and which synthesise or integrate methods and knowledge from multiple disciplinary domains’ (ARC, 2016, p. 3). In this presentation, we explore the evidence base to support interdisciplinary research, and how this relates to our team’s experiences with our project, output and impact. Our stakeholders are Defence, Veteran, First Responder and Remote Worker families who face unique stresses. Children can struggle to understand what is happening in their family during parental absences, frequent relocations and changes related to parents’ service-related injuries, mental health conditions and moral injuries. Until now, children from these families, and their parents, educators and support workers in regional, rural and remote areas faced limited access to supports, exacerbated by frequent relocations. The Children’s Family Resilience Programs (CFRP) project co-designed and co-created free, award-winning, online, research-based resources to address this gap. Initially, the accessibility of these online resources was limited to a website, which proved to be less user-friendly as time-poor users had to search for resources themselves. Through the Manna Institute, the CFRP team was able to connect with a Machine Vision Digital Health Researcher to co-design and co-create a free, anonymous, personalised program for users. The outcomes of our research showcase the improved capacity to elevate community programs through interdisciplinary approaches. This discussion and exemplar will be of interest to researchers interested in interdisciplinary research as we explore the benefits and challenges it creates.