Page 24 -

1.6 The nature of interdisciplinary research in HCI 9

may measure “how often?” or “how long?” but not “why?” However, they are still
well-understood and well-accepted metrics, and they allow HCI researchers to com-
municate their results to other research communities where the cutting-edge tools
and research methods may not be well-understood or well-accepted.
You may not be able to use experimental laboratory research to learn why people
don't use technology. If you want to examine how people use portable or mobile
technology such as smart phones and wearable computing, there are limitations to
studying that in a controlled laboratory setting. If you want to study how people com-
municate with trusted partners, choose to perform business transactions with some-
one they don't know on another continent (as often happens with Ebay), or choose to
collaborate, you need to find new ways of research and new forms of measurement.
These are not research questions that can be answered with quantitative measure-
ments in a short-term laboratory setting.
Consider Wikipedia, a collaborative, open-source encyclopedia. Currently, more
than five million articles exist in English on Wikipedia, with an estimate of 70,000
active contributors (https://www.wikipedia.org), who spend their own time creating
and editing Wikipedia entries. What causes them to do so? What do they get out of
the experience? Clearly, task and time performance would not be appropriate metrics
to use. But what metrics should be used? Joy? Emotion? A feeling of community?
Lower blood pressure? This may not be a phenomenon that can be studied in a con-
trolled laboratory setting (Menking and Erickson, 2015). The field of HCI has be-
gun to apply more research methods from the social sciences, and we encourage the
reader to start using some new research approaches that are not even in this textbook!
Please be aware that people from other disciplines, as well as your “home discipline,”
will probably challenge the appropriateness of those research methods!

1.6 THE NATURE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH IN HCI
Interdisciplinary research using multiple research methods, is not always easy to do.
There are many challenges that can arise, in many cases due to the individual cul-
tures of each of the disciplines involved. The HCI community might be considered
by some to be an interdisciplinary community, a multidisciplinary community, or its
own discipline (Blackwell, 2015). Regardless of the status of HCI as interdisciplin-
ary, multidisciplinary, or its own discipline, many conferences, professional organi-
zations, and academic departments keep the focus on their primary discipline. When
interdisciplinary research gets filtered through single-discipline evaluations, there
are many challenges that can occur. Some of the challenges are well-known, such
as how some disciplines (e.g., computer science) focus more on conference publica-
tions and others (e.g., management information systems) focus on journal publica-
tions (Grudin, 2006a). Some disciplines focus on single-author publications, while
others focus primarily on group-author publications. Some disciplines are very open
about sharing their results, while others keep their results more confidential. Some
disciplines are very self-reflective and do research studies about their discipline