1. INTRODUCTION
Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to stimulate creative thinking and generate innovative ideas in response to the increased acknowledgement that traditional forms of scientific research are falling short of meeting the demands of major societal challenges such as the rapid decarbonisation of the built environment, to which many building scientists devote their lives (Bracken & Oughton 2006; Dalton et al. 2022; Daniel et al. 2022; Brunner 2025; Hadfield-Hill et al. 2020; Robinson 2008). The need for interdisciplinary work is growing, while resources dedicated to research are being clawed back and eliminated, especially in North American contexts (e.g. CCA 2025; Kozlov et al. 2026). While interdisciplinary research is rightly seen as a ‘gold standard’ by many universities and funding agencies (Rylance 2015; Woolley et al. 2015), performing this work presents considerable challenges for those who do it. As argued by Siedlok & Hibbert (2014), Tobi & Kampen (2018) and Vladova et al. (2025), doing interdisciplinary research requires more resources, including time and personnel, than traditional research within disciplinary siloes.
This article synthesises critical reflections on research design, participant engagement and data collection that speak to many of the realities of interdisciplinary building science research, bound by the limits of time, resources and disciplinary siloes. It identifies barriers and unanticipated situations encountered by a team of interdisciplinary researchers conducting this work across multiple, interrelated projects in recent years. It particularly focuses on navigating the epistemological tensions between members of the research team and building trust with the study participants. The article contributes theoretical and empirical evidence of the practical challenges of ‘doing’ interdisciplinary building science research to the literature. These critical reflections are intended to help other researchers conducting similar work to avoid our missteps in interdisciplinary research design and to improve participant retention over multi-year, multi-site research projects.
2. Literature Review
Both building scientists and social scientists operate in wider institutional and grant-making contexts that prioritise the generation of high-impact research outputs evaluated through similar quantitative metrics and indicators, such as the number of citations, the impact factor of journals, and article reads and downloads (Haddow & Hammarfelt 2019; Williams & Roth 2019). Despite this shared overall goal, the characteristics of what is considered ‘good research practice’ for buildings scientists may break the disciplinary conventions of social scientists, and visa versa. Beyond quantitative metrics, for example, building scientists often view successful research as not only resulting in improvements in building design and performance but also contributing to the development or advancement of international building performance standards, such as those set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) (de Wilde 2019). While social scientists often view similar policy impacts as a key goal of their work, successful research for them includes added dimensions such as the meaningful inclusions of a variety of stakeholders, the co-creation of knowledge and the positive impacts of the lives of those communities that their research addresses (Aiello et al. 2021).
The key differences in their approaches, then, are the involvement of and expected outcomes for research participants. For building scientists, research participants benefit from improvements to the overall performance and design of the buildings they inhabit. For social scientists, participants benefit from both their role in the research processes itself as well as through improvements to the wider norms, policies and practices that govern the ways in which their buildings are designed, operated and evaluated. These dual approaches present challenges to the ways in which explorations of building performance and experience are designed as well as the relationships between researchers and participants.
Despite these shared goals, building science research is often conducted within disciplinary boundaries in accordance with established methodological and participant engagement norms and practices. Research led by building scientists often uses similar approaches to research design, data collection, analysis and research outputs, whereas those led by social scientists use their own discipline-specific approaches to these same dimensions. For building scientists, these approaches often focus on energy performance and indoor environmental quality understood through environmental monitoring, building automation system observation, simulations and occupant surveys focused on the more technical components of occupant comfort and behaviour (e.g. Azari & Rashed-Ali 2021). Social scientists exploring building performance, alternatively, typically rely on more qualitative components, including in-depth occupant surveys, interviews, focus groups, and occasionally visual and art-based approaches such as photovoice (Denzin & Lincoln 2011; Stockemer et al. 2019). While researchers from either camp share common goals of understanding and ultimately improving building performance in both energy and human terms, they are grounded in distinct epistemological positions that are often at odds (Schweber & Leiringer 2012; Gram-Hanssen & Georg 2018).
Guerra-Santin et al. (2024: 2) argue that the primary limitations of the infiltration of social science theories into building science are that they:
lack the technical detail to decide how to measure and evaluate building behavior and do not support the modeling of one or more dimensions of building material and energy performance.
Moreover, according to Tweed & Zapata-Lancaster (2018: 553), the dominant technical approaches are ‘good at telling us what happens in buildings and in quantifying various aspects of measurable performance’, yet these primarily technical methods often ‘do not aim to explain why inhabitants feel or behave as they do’. Building on the work of Cole et al. (2010), Tweed & Zapata-Lancaster (2018) argue that one approach to integrate the theoretical concepts more effectively from the social sciences into the building sciences is to enhance and extend existing methods of building performance assessment.
Building scientists have pushed these boundaries with the integration of more qualitative methods used broadly in community-based social science and design research practices, such as photovoice (Day et al. 2020). Drawing from the fields of sociology, geography and public health, and cognate disciplines, these qualitative methods may include interviews, focus groups or forms of more participatory research such as, but not limited to, methods such as photovoice (Masterson et al. 2018) or auto-ethnography (Bochner 2023). The integration of these efforts with traditional technical building science methods may help researchers provide context and understanding to observed performance and environmental data (Day & O’Brien 2017; Day et al. 2020).
Studies that combine typical building science and social science methods can, in practice, be challenges for both groups. Just as building scientists may have trouble navigating social science approaches and methods, the same is true of social scientists, and especially qualitative researchers, in terms of understanding and deploying the more quantitative, technical, traditional methods of building performance assessment. In turn, this can limit the possibility of interdisciplinary research instrumentally in terms of how research designs are developed and implemented as well as revealing wider tensions between what empirical results can and cannot say about building performance in both material and human terms.
3. METHODS
The critical reflections on interdisciplinary building science research presented here emerged from a suite of projects under the umbrella of the ‘Wellbeing in the Built Environment’ (WBE) project led by researchers based in the engineering, geography, architecture and public health faculties at the University of Toronto (Hub for Advanced Buildings n.d.). This section includes an overview of the methods used during these projects as they specifically relate to the challenges of interdisciplinarity in building science research. These include a brief explanation of the projects’ research design, data collection and participant engagement strategies.
The WBE research agenda explored the relationships between building performance and design and the wellbeing of their inhabitants. The suite of projects combines traditional methods of building performance assessment, such as environmental monitoring and momentary ecological surveys (i.e. smartwatch observations), with in-person inhabitant surveys and photovoice, a form of qualitative participatory research where participants take photographs of elements of their lived experience and then reflect upon the themes in the photographs, pioneered by Wang (1999) and Wang & Burris (1997), concerning individual and collective experience of a variety of building types. These included campus instructional settings, work-from-home environments and multi-unit residential communities. The breadth and depth of data-collection methods for the multi-year projects required significant investments in participant engagement and recruitment as well as frequent site visits. Table 1 shows the data-collection methods used across these subprojects.
Table 1
Methods deployed across the ‘Wellbeing in the Built Environment’ (WBE) subprojects.
| METHODS | SUBPROJECTS | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| WORK FROM HOME | MULTI-UNIT RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS | CAMPUS ENVIRONMENT | |
| Indoor environmental monitoring |
|
|
|
| Inhabitant surveys |
|
| |
| Smartwatch-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) |
|
|
|
| Semi-structured interviews |
|
|
|
| Photovoice |
|
|
|
The research design and implementation process of these projects were documented, including a record of how the research team worked together as well as how participants felt about the project’s methods and approach during the process. These data were compiled in the form of field notes prepared by the same on-site researcher, which were then shared with the wider research team and discussed at weekly project meetings throughout the data-collection process. When urgent issues were flagged by on-site researchers, emergency team meetings were held to discuss and generate responses, including direct communication with research partners if needed.
Field notes followed a standardised format, beginning with a daily summary of the number of participants who were engaged and the data-collection streams they completed (e.g. did they complete a seasonal survey or was the interaction primarily to install or maintain indoor environmental monitoring equipment). In addition to documenting participant identified issues with the buildings that occurred between site visits, such as power outages, medical emergencies or community programming, they also included researcher and participant reflections on the in-person survey, issues with environmental monitoring equipment, important issues that inhabitants felt were not being addressed by building providers and managers, such as security and pest infestations, and overall feedback on their experience as part of the project, including outcomes for building inhabitants. These field notes provide an empirical basis for the critical reflections presented in the following sections.
4. CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON RESEARCH DESIGN, METHODS AND IMPLEMENTATION
This section presents critical reflections, organised thematically, on the challenges the authors encountered in conducting interdisciplinary building science research across multiple study sites and projects, beginning with the resources required to conduct this work.
4.1 RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS: TIME, EFFORT AND PARTICIPANT ENGAGEMENT
4.1.1 Reflection 1: Learning how to work together as a research team in the early stages of the research design is necessary if integrated approaches are to be developed
Despite previous experience, the research team did not anticipate the considerable time and resources required not only to engage with participants but also to learn to work together among themselves. As is the case with many interdisciplinary research efforts, the project required the team to navigate the ontological, epistemological and methodological tensions between researchers with social science and engineering backgrounds (Moon & Blackman 2014; Winksel 2014; Daniel et al. 2022). Team members included researchers from building science, geography, architecture and public health. Each discipline has its own approaches to research and analysis, anticipations of the time involved, or speed of data collection and analysis, and conflicting expectations in terms of replicability, best practices and terminology (Kendra & Nigg 2014; Jones & MacDonald 2007).
Working through these internal differences in training and research practice during the research design stages was a non-linear process that demanded considerably more time than initially imagined. For example, one tension within the team concerned different perspectives on the nature of individual agency. For team members grounded in certain forms of social theory, the dominant understanding of individuals as discrete, rational actors with agency over their lives is incomplete because it overlooks more collective processes of identity and meaning-creation, as well as their structural determinants (e.g. Jetten et al. 2014; Lorimer et al. 2022). These positions ran against the building science researchers on the team, whose discipline is, in many ways, grounded on the assumption that building users are unique and rational and that their behaviour can be explicitly understood in terms of how individuals perceive and use the environmental elements of a particular building (Evans & McCoy 1998; Baum & Valins 2024).
The research team did not attempt to ‘solve’ or ameliorate these tensions, which remained throughout the data-collection and analysis stages across all subprojects. Even with the considerable amount of time researchers spent working through these issues, differences in understanding between team members regularly arose throughout the research process. These included, for example, differing perspectives on the core theoretical foundations of interdisciplinary research, conceptions of individual and collective agency, and the boundaries between individuals and communities.
At each stage of the research design process, the researchers attempted to break disciplinary siloes. Rather than separating into quantitative or qualitative teams, researchers intentionally cross-pollinated expertise across all the methodological design, data-collection and participant-engagement efforts. This included those with limited exposure to or familiarity with particular methods, regardless of their academic seniority. Those trained in qualitative methods were involved with sensor installation and monitoring, while those with technical orientations were involved in participant recruitment and the photovoice process within each subproject. These different orientations of research team members raised contentious issues regarding types of data collection, which could have been missed if the researchers approached the data with more typical siloed methodological and epistemological approaches. While it would have been a more efficient use of limited resources, the research team felt that pairing building science and social science members on all data-collection efforts would help to break down disciplinary siloes in the subsequent analysis process.
4.1.2 Reflection 2: Building relationships with participants facilitates participant retention and access to additional data, while also enabling social science methods to be more successful
Researchers built trust by spending time with participants across the suite of WBE projects beyond the purely transactional interactions required for data collection. This took several forms, depending on the subproject of the larger WBE project. Working at the campus setting, on-site researchers were able to build rapport with potential participants due to their shared experience as students, teaching assistants and instructors working in the same classrooms and buildings being studied. Building rapport was more direct with the subproject that explored work-from-home environments as both researchers and participants were working remotely as students at the same university in accordance with physical distancing requirements imposed by the Government of Canada during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the subproject based in multi-unit residential settings, the researchers began by learning about residents’ lives and connecting with them as people, rather than as ‘research participants’, over the course of frequent site visits. On-site researchers got to know participants just as they continued to learn more about the on-site research team. Early in the projects based at multi-unit residential buildings, for example, when the researchers had yet to build relationships of trust and mutual accountability with other participants, for example, these highly engaged participants served as important mediators between the research team and potential participants. By vouching for the researchers early on, they leveraged their ongoing relationships with their neighbours, peers and co-workers to help recruit participants to the study in ways that the researchers, as outsiders, simply could not have accomplished working independently. This rapport was built over the course of numerous site visits over the course of the project, accounting for a total of 224 person-hours on-site. A breakdown of the time spent on-site is shown in Table 2.
Table 2
Estimated researcher time spent with participants of the multi-unit residential buildings subproject during the data-collection period.
| EVENT OR STAGE | RESEARCHERS PER VISIT | VISITS PER EVENT | AVERAGE TIME PER VISIT (H) | TOTAL PERSON-HOURS ON-SITE PER VISIT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch event | 5 | 1 | 3 | 15 |
| Survey 1 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 20 |
| In-suite sensor installation | 2 | 3 | 4 | 24 |
| Survey 2 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 25 |
| Sensor monitoring and troubleshooting | 2 | 3 | 2 | 12 |
| Smartwatch training and distribution | 2 | 2 | 3 | 12 |
| Survey 3: smartwatch collection | 1 | 4 | 4 | 16 |
| Sensor monitoring and troubleshooting | 2 | 2 | 2 | 8 |
| Photovoice training; smartwatch distribution | 2 | 3 | 3 | 18 |
| Survey 4: photovoice data collection; smartwatch collection | 1 | 3 | 4 | 12 |
| In-suite sensor removal | 2 | 3 | 7 | 42 |
| Photovoice sense-making session | 4 | 1 | 3 | 12 |
| Key findings presentation and thank you event | 4 | 1 | 2 | 8 |
| Total visits = 36 | Total hours on-site = 224 |
For this subproject, the relatively small population size of study sites (fewer than 150 inhabitants worked in the research team’s favour as inhabitants regularly interacted with one another). While efforts were made by the research team to keep participant identities confidential, in practice participants in the project regularly shared their involvement in the project with their neighbours. Participants often encouraged their friends in the building to participate in the project, even though they were not asked or compensated for being informal advocates for the study. This was instrumental in driving recruitment and in assuaging the concerns many inhabitants had about whether they could trust members of the research team.
The trust that developed between on-site researchers and study participants paid off in terms of the level of detail they were able to collect about how the buildings were performing as both material objects and dynamic communities. By the second and third surveys, for example, participants were not only answering the survey prompts but also sharing information about issues not covered in the survey, such as community dynamics and cliques, elements of building performance in the use of collective spaces that were not being addressed by the building operator, and the strategies they frequently used to skirt the rules and regulations in order to better support their wellbeing in the building. For example, researchers learned that certain participants frequently turned their ovens on with the door open to heat their units in winter, and that several residents regularly prepared meals for their neighbours who were unable to use their kitchens due to accessibility issues and/or a lack of support.
Beyond recruitment, these early participants often served as informal intermediaries between on-site researchers and study participants, especially during site visits. It was sometimes difficult for researchers to connect with participants during data-collection periods because of unreliable cell-phone service within the buildings. When researchers had difficulty connecting to participants on-site, these early participants could often connect with other participants quickly, either by calling their new contact numbers, contacting them via Facebook and/or by knocking on their doors. Moreover, when the data-collection and engagement team arrived on-site, these individuals were often the first people they engaged with and they were quick to offer updates on what was happening in the building and/or to pass along information from participants who the researchers were scheduled to meet with but who were running late or had to cancel the appointment.
In hindsight, the research team should have included additional compensation for their assistance above and beyond honoraria for completing components of the project, for their involvement was often well over and above those activities. At the same time, relationship-building may be seen as its own reward and formalising it could diminish its power. Although some scholars have argued that the trust-building aspects described above may be damaged or coerced by a formalised compensation scheme (e.g. Millum & Garnett 2019), research teams will need to consider carefully if additional compensation for assistance beyond their participation in data-collection components is needed, in light of what Różyńska (2022: 452) describes as ‘a prima facie moral obligation to offer payment to research subjects’.
4.1.3 Reflection 3: Building relationships between researchers and on-site staff supports barrier-free data collection and streamlines communication with the study participants
Across all WBE subprojects, administrative and on-site staff played an important role in coordinating site visits and distributing information about the projects to potential participants. In the work-from-home subproject, researchers were aided by administrative staff in multiple departments across the university in distributing project information and fliers. In the campus subproject, administrative staff played a similar role, also assisting with contacting with instructors in the classrooms being studied to arrange for on-site data collection by a member of the research team. Administrative staff also worked with members of the research team to identify classroom environments that would be well-suited for the project, to approve sensor installation and to share background information on the overall performance of the study buildings. During this process, there were occasional conflicts between the research team and administrative staff in terms of the sharing of data or granting permission to collect data in certain classrooms at certain times during the academic semester. Despite working at the same university, conflicts arose from both bureaucratic processes, such as securing required approvals to install sensors, and inter-faculty research policies, such as those that constrained or prevented research being conducted in classrooms led by affiliated faculty. These conflicts required additional time commitments from members of the research team, but were eventually resolved with limited disruptions to the project’s overall timeline.
In the multi-unit residential building subproject, on-site staff played an even greater role throughout the data-collection process. Not only did they assist the research team during site visits but also they reminded participants about upcoming study-related events and passed along questions from participants to members of the research team to ensure that site visits were conducted efficiently. On-site staff also served as informal ‘eyes and ears’ on what was happening in the building between the site visits. The researchers benefited from good communication with on-site staff, particularly those who regularly interacted with residents. Often occurring before and after survey or sensor data collection, these informal exchanges also helped on-site researchers place their data in the broader context of the daily experiences of living in these buildings. Events such as broken elevators, power outages and the occasional fire that forced the entire building to evacuate all impacted resident wellbeing. Being aware of these types of events helped explain interruptions to in-suite environmental monitoring data. While researchers were able to collect this information from participants, they would have benefited from improved regular communication with higher-level staff at their partner organisations to establish procedures for sharing this information.
While the research team’s partnership with on-site staff was critical to both recruitment, retention and learning about what was happening in the building between visits (e.g. power disruptions), they did not fully anticipate how this close working relationship would be perceived by the study participants and other building residents. Although all the research team’s communication and recruitment materials stated clearly that the research was not being led by the sites’ housing providers and that no one beyond the research team would have access to the anonymised data collected, this was not sufficient, as many inhabitants did not believe that the research team was truly acting independently. They were hesitant to share personal information about their wellbeing out of a fear that these data would find their way back to the building owners, which, in turn, they believed might affect their tenancy or relationships with on-site staff. Even though the research team included clear statements in their materials that their potential participation would not impact their tenancy in any way, there was still significant hesitation. As many residents at both the subproject’s study sites had experienced housing precarity before moving into the units, this fear was acute and based on first-hand experience.
As discussed in more detail in Reflection 4 below, at the same time the relationship that many participants assumed the research team had with the building operators led many residents to ask the researchers to intervene on their behalf to address ongoing issues in the building they felt were not being sufficiently addressed by the operators, owners and management. While research teams would only be able to potentially assuage these fears through their actions over the course of a project, anticipating this push-back early in the design process would have enabled a more coordinated and effective response.
4.2 DATA COLLECTION
4.2.1 Reflection 4: Increasing the inclusivity of the research implementation process can help to avoid potential challenges or delays when they are rolled out in practice
When working with participants as part of the multi-unit residential building subproject to schedule surveys, smart device distribution, and sensor installations and maintenance, the researchers learned early on to be flexible. Participants often had unpredictable schedules that were beyond their control. Even if on-site researchers were unable to connect with participants on visits, spending time on-site paid dividends in other ways in terms of supporting relationships with researchers and residents between periods of data collection. Additional flexibility is required when conducting multiple data-collection efforts simultaneously, especially when data collection involves entering participants’ homes. The researchers could have been more proactive in checking in regularly with participants to ensure they were not encountering technical issues or other barriers, rather than learning about these issues after the data-collection period concluded. By maintaining a regular connection with residents, the researchers may also have been able to identify and remove barriers for participants before they decided not to complete certain elements of the study or withdraw completely.
Research teams may also benefit from interrogating their own assumptions about the relative capacity of building inhabitants to participate. The approaches the researchers thought were intuitive, convenient and unobtrusive were not necessarily so in practice. For example, the team assumed that older participants would have more difficulty operating smart devices (phone and watch) than younger participants. On-site researchers met one-on-one with each participant to explain how the devices worked and to answer questions residents had before the data-collection process began. This assumption was supported by the fact that younger participants tended to tell on-site researchers that they already knew how everything (meaning smart devices) worked and did not need help setting things up or going through examples. When it was time to collect the data, however, they found a much lower participation rate among these younger participants. While there were often non-research-related reasons for not completing the tasks (e.g. medical appointments, family emergencies and, in some cases, participants forgetting about the task), many of these participants also later admitted they did not know how to complete the activities. The researchers learned they should have been checking in with residents during the data-collection period to make sure they understood what they were being asked to do, even if they initially said everything was clear.
Where possible, research teams may benefit from building flexibility into the data-collection tools to account for participant insights such as these. This could include anticipating that the surveys would be modified over time based on resident feedback or team reflections, as well as building in strategies to adopt certain collection methods to ensure that all participants could complete them regardless of their physical or cognitive capacities. For example, due to visual and physical impairments, several participants were unable to operate the smartwatches as intended. In these cases, the researchers provided alternative ways of collecting data that reflected their self-identified preferences. For instance, paper-based surveys with larger font size were developed, and a smartphone with five daily alarms was provided to participants as a reminder to complete the paper survey. The alternative data-collection approach worked well, and the participants were satisfied with this workaround co-created with the research team.
4.2.2 Reflection 5: Managing participant expectations is important when conducting interdisciplinary building science research
Because of the higher level of participant engagement required for interdisciplinary building science research, there are often higher expectations from participants regarding study outcomes compared with other projects. This also raised questions about the ways in which researchers may inadvertently overstate the potential benefits of the research. There may be several reasons for this, including: a desire for themselves also to believe their work can have an impact; wanting to be seen in a good light; and perhaps sensing this might negatively impact participation (e.g. Opsal et al. 2016). For these reasons, researchers would benefit from setting clear expectations with participants and partners that the study, on its own, will not change the participants’ lives. This is especially important when working with participants who live in a study building.
When working in residential communities, research teams should guard against raising unrealistic expectations that the research would catalyse change (or even be shared in detail with site managers and operators). Researchers have to balance between the articulation of ‘potential benefits’ and real or imagined limitations on actual intervention and advocacy, a fine line that is often not well appreciated by (nor well explained to) participants. It is reasonable for participants to expect that researchers with knowledge and status/legitimacy that they themselves lack could have more sway in getting longstanding resident concerns addressed than they themselves could do, even if/when they were ‘armed’ with the study’s results.
Researchers would benefit from clearly communicating their responsibilities to residents in terms of addressing potential conditions in the building as they are made aware of them during the research process, rather than waiting until the data-collection and analysis processes are complete. A key dimension of this approach is committing to advocating for the participants’ needs and aspirations whenever possible. For example, in the multi-unit residential building subproject, when on-site researchers discovered that the common area was not available for resident use despite their request to access it, they communicated to the building operator on their behalf, who adjusted their protocols to allow residents to book and use the space. Also, when bed bugs were reported in study buildings, the research team alerted building management, who brought in a pest control team. While researchers could not address all the operational issues observed, they worked to amplify the voices of the participants directly with senior staff at the housing operators. This resulted in expedited pest treatment, which in turn helped to build trust with on-site researchers, as there was a clear example of the researchers helping residents address a community issue.
4.2.3 Reflection 6: Carefully considering how the project will end may help to mitigate negative impacts on researchers and participants alike
The approach required and relied on rapport between on-site researchers, on-site staff and participants. This rapport was built on mutual trust, and accountability developed over time through in-home visits, in-depth surveys, phone calls between visits and informal conversations within the building. How can or should this rapport be honoured in ways that avoid what may be described as the ‘research cliff’, or considering the long-term impacts of the research process on participants after a project is complete (Pitt 2025). This ‘cliff’ may occur as early as when data collection is complete, but more often manifests at the end of a research project after funding has run out and/or research outputs have been published, at which time the researchers inevitably move on to the next project and the research participants ‘return’ to their daily lives. Engagement with participants often suddenly stops, and the relationships that were built over the research period are abandoned. Teams may benefit from developing disentanglement strategies since engaged research of this nature becomes a small part of the lives of residents and may impact their overall building experience.
The rapport developed between on-site researchers and participants over the data-collection period enabled the researchers to gain a broader understanding of both the indoor environmental conditions and the characteristics of daily life for residents and staff in the study buildings. To thank them for their commitment to the research project, the research team hosted results-sharing events at both sites. These two-hour events were catered, and all participants and residents were invited. The researchers presented their overall findings and distributed a two-page summary of the results for each person in attendance. The remainder of the events provided opportunities for participants to reflect on their involvement in the research process. Researchers also collected contact information for all participants who wished to receive copies of the published reports, academic articles and plain-language recommendations to all residents and building operators.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Interdisciplinary building science research requires research teams not only to devote considerable effort to ensure their research design is both reflective of participants’ lived experiences and flexible, but also to look inward to explore how they function as an interdisciplinary unit. Just as building trust with participants can help enable qualitative methods to be more successful, learning how to work together effectively as teams comprised of researchers with different theoretical orientations and methodological expertise also has considerable value in terms of efficiency and mutual support. This support is especially important for members of the research team who are on-site conducting data collection and building relationships with the participants.
Investing in and maintaining relationships between on-site researchers and participants early in the project is perhaps more important when conducting interdisciplinary building science research than in traditional building science or social science projects. This is not only because it has instrumental value in aiding participant recruitment and retention, but also because building trust between researchers and participants is particularly important when attempting to understand how buildings perform and are experienced. As social science methods incur more ‘on-the-ground time’, adopting a more relationships-based and interdisciplinary approach may streamline the research process and reduce friction both between researchers and participants as well as between members of a research team themselves. This relationships-based approach to integrated building science research, however, places additional demands on research teams to explore the potential impacts that their work may have on participant experience before, throughout, and after data collection and analysis are complete.
While these impacts are often not immediately apparent to researchers, their ‘neutral’ third-party positionality may be able to maximise the positive impacts of their work by also acting as advocates for participants in their ongoing efforts to improve the indoor conditions in and overall experience of the buildings being investigated. Although this dual role of researcher–advocate may be unfamiliar and even uncomfortable for building scientists and others trained to maintain a critical distance from study participants, it offers a promising approach to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the building experience and to work towards less extractive forms of research broadly, which are mutually beneficial to participants and researchers alike.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors acknowledge the robust contributions of the ‘Wellbeing in the Built Environment’ (WBE) project’s study participants, institutional partners and frontline staff at the study sites. Without their trust, knowledge and assistance, this research would not have been possible.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Conceptualisation: G.T.M., M.T., J.R., A.J.; research: G.T.M., J.T., M.T.; formal analysis: G.T.M., M.T., J.R., A.J.; writing—original draft preparation: G.T.M.; writing—reviewing and editing: G.T.M., M.T., J.R., A.J., J.T.,; supervision: M.T., J.R., A.J.; project administration: J.T., M.T., J.R.; funding acquisition: M.T., J.R., A.J.
DATA ACCESSIBILITY
The datasets generated and analysed during the suite of ‘Wellbeing in the Built Environment’ (WBE) studies are not publicly available at the time of submission.