There are benefits and challenges in an interdisciplinary approach to research, argues Edith Cowan University researcher Fangli Hu.
Driven by scientific advances and social demands, interdisciplinary research has grown into an important trend in academia.
For example, collaborations are growing between the natural and social sciences. Convergence research, which aims to tackle complex issues using interdisciplinary approaches, represents an emerging paradigm.
The merging of the International Council for Science and the International Social Science Council in 2018 to form the International Science Council highlighted the integration of these disciplines.
A strange marriage?
The blending of tourism and medical science may at first seem an unusual pairing. In truth, however, these fields are related: the mobile nature of travel can spread infectious diseases and aggravate public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. These circumstances can in turn threaten the tourism and hospitality industry.
At the same time, tourism can help address public health issues such as noncommunicable diseases and healthy ageing by improving people’s quality of life.
Travel medicine, an interdisciplinary branch of medicine, specialises in travellers’ health and safety, which has an initial focus on infectious diseases, but now is enriched with more components such as non-communicable chronic diseases.
Non-pharmacological interventions can lead to travel experiences that promote health, prevent disease, and relieve illness. These treatment options can also encourage physical movement, social interaction, healthy eating, and positive emotions.
Travel therapy is suitable for multiple groups, including healthy people, those in suboptimal health, and those with conditions such as intellectual disabilities. Research bridging tourism and the medical sciences can benefit numerous stakeholders – especially given concerns about health, hygiene and safety raised by COVID-19.
For academics, such collaboration provides fresh perspectives to produce a deeper understanding of tourism’s role in public health, while for the general public, particularly vulnerable populations, interdisciplinary studies can prioritise equality in health and tourism by outlining health-related benefits and problems in travel.
These efforts can help health care and tourism practitioners develop targeted products and services as well. Socially, interdisciplinary research may partly mitigate public health challenges to foster sustainable development.
Tourism left out
Despite these advantages, studies linking tourism and medical science face barriers. Medical researchers have paid little attention to tourism.
Travel medicine pertains to health and safety during trips. However, it generally revolves around disease to the neglect of possible relationships between tourists’ behaviour and health.
Even less emphasis has been placed on the health benefits of tourism. Several studies have considered the underexplored tourist groups, namely those with health conditions such as dementia, depression, and intellectual disabilities.
But few have demonstrated a solid understanding of medical science. Research findings could be misleading in the absence of clear disease definitions and diagnoses, sample inclusion and exclusion criteria, and ethical considerations. High-quality research blending tourism and medical science is needed to deliver insightful results.
Yet disciplinary obstacles persist. Firstly, health issues are often thought to fall under the purview of medical science whereas tourism belongs to the social sciences. Secondly, academic culture itself can hinder interdisciplinary work: fields feature their own theories, methodologies, concepts, and values, making collaboration complicated.
Scholars need to reach a consensus about interdisciplinary research from several standpoints, spanning research questions, designs, instruments, sample selection, and data analysis. Additionally, medical science stresses objective clinical evidence; tourism, as a soft science, involves subjective judgment.
These differences and associated disciplinary bias can impede interdisciplinary communication. Although such bias is rarely publicly acknowledged, inequitable power relations exist between disciplines and can affect the resolution of collaboration-based disputes.
Thirdly, due to the range of involved research areas, interdisciplinary projects face difficulties in peer review and publication. Traditional single-disciplinary review criteria make it hard to fairly assess these projects’ methods, data, and results.
All that said, the benefits of quality interdisciplinary studies blending tourism and medical science outweigh the challenges. High-impact discoveries, such as the potential clinical efficacy of tourism in treating disease, often occur at the intersection of fields. Experts from these two seemingly unrelated disciplines should be called upon to jointly explore solutions to public health problems and promote sustainable societal development.
ED: Fangli Hu is a PhD candidate in the School of Medical and Health Sciences at ECU. Dr Jun Wen (School of Business and Law) and Professor Wei Wang (Centre for Precision Health) at ECU contributed to this article.