A qualitative study of interdisciplinary near-peer research mentoring in professional training

Abstract

Although literature on interdisciplinary training has shown some promise for enabling students to cross disciplinary barriers, little is known about how being mentors to near-peers in other disciplines could initiate psychology trainees into their future role in a multidisciplinary team. This article aims to describe the experiences of psychology and urban planning students who participated in a near-peer interdisciplinary research mentoring program to understand how psychology trainees could benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration. Three focus group discussions were conducted with the students about their experiences of the program and a thematic analysis was performed on the data to distill themes focusing on the interdisciplinary aspects of the mentoring. Four themes regarding the students’ experiences were generated: challenges regarding disciplinary roles, challenges regarding the clarity of interdisciplinary collaboration, the value of interdisciplinary collaboration for academic outcomes, and the value of interdisciplinary mentoring for professional identities. The findings indicate that, despite experiencing some challenges, students from different disciplines can benefit from guiding and being guided through the research and writing process. In particular the psychology students were able to see how their role as mentors contributed to the development of their personal and professional identities as future researchers. Interdisciplinary collaboration may present psychology trainees with an opportunity to demonstrate the unique contribution that psychology can make to a shared issue and assist them to develop a collective, multiple understanding of a research topic that could also model power sharing with clients.