Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences: Approaches and Rationale

Interdisciplinary research is integration of ideas, information, methods, tools, techniques, perspectives, concepts and theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge for development as well as implementation of distinctively interdisciplinary theory based research process to advance fundamental understanding and to solve problems whose solution are beyond the scope of single discipline or area of research practice. This paper makes an attempt to compare interdisciplinary research with unidisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The research paper also explores various approaches of interdisciplinary research. The exploratory research has also been made to discover the rationale of interdisciplinary research. To accomplish the cause SWOC analysis of interdisciplinary research is also carried out.