Week 1 Task

Cross-disciplinary
cross-dis·ci·pli·nar·y, adjective, involving two or more academic disciplines; interdisciplinary: cross-disciplinary studies in Biblical archaeology.

Crossdisciplinarity describes any method, project and research activity that examines a subject outside the scope of its own discipline without cooperation or integration from other relevant disciplines. In crossdisciplinarity, topics are studied using foreign methodologies of unrelated disciplines, for example Ethics in clinical research and occupational health.
Crossdisciplinarity is distinctly different from Interdisciplinarity because of the relationship that the disciplines share. Within a crossdisciplinary relationship disciplinary boundaries are crossed but no techniques or ideals are exchanged while Interdisciplinary relationships blend the practices and assumptions of each discipline involved.
Multidisciplinarity is very closely related to crossdisciplinarity because there is no transfer of methodologies or cooperation between the disciplines but different in that 'more than one' other outside discipline examines a specific topic.

Inter-disciplinary
in·ter·dis·ci·pli·nar·y, adjective , means combining or involving two or more academic disciplines or fields of study: The economics and history departments are offering an interdisciplinary seminar on Asia. Or combining or involving two or more professions, technologies, departments, or the like, as in business or industry.

Interdisciplinarity involves the combining of two or more academic fields into one single discipline. An interdisciplinary field crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged.
Originally the term interdisciplinary is applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that use methods and insights of several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. Interdisciplinarity involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies - along with their specific perspectives - in the pursuit of a common task. The epidemiology of AIDS or global warming require understanding of diverse disciplines to solve neglected problems. Interdisciplinary may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women's studies or ethnic area studies.

Trans-disciplinary
Transdisciplinary connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline, but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field research method originally developed in anthropology but now widely used by other disciplines.

Qualitative research
Qualitative research is a method of inquiry employed in many different academic disciplines, traditionally in the social sciences, but also in market research and further contexts. Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often needed than large samples.
In the conventional view, qualitative methods produce information only on the particular cases studied, and any more general conclusions are only propositions (informed assertions). Quantitative methods can then be used to seek empirical support for such research hypotheses. This view has been disputed by Oxford University professor Bent Flyvbjerg, who argues that qualitative methods and case study research may be used both for hypotheses-testing and for generalizing beyond the particular cases studied.

Qualitative research seeks out the ‘why’, not the ‘how’ of its topic through the analysis of unstructured information – things like interview transcripts, open ended survey responses, emails, notes, feedback forms, photos and videos. It doesn’t just rely on statistics or numbers, which are the domain of quantitative researchers.

Qualitative research is used to gain insight into people's attitudes, behaviours, value systems, concerns, motivations, aspirations, culture or lifestyles. It’s used to inform business decisions, policy formation, communication and research. Focus groups, in-depth interviews, content analysis, ethnography, evaluation and semiotics are among the many formal approaches that are used, but qualitative research also involves the analysis of any unstructured material, including customer feedback forms, reports or media clips.

Collecting and analyzing this unstructured information can be messy and time consuming using manual methods. When faced with volumes of materials, finding themes and extracting meaning can be a daunting task.

Ethnographic Research
Ethnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of sociocultural phenomena. Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not necessarily geographic, considering also work, leisure, and other communities), selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. Such informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community, using chain sampling to obtain a saturation of informants in all empirical areas of investigation. Informants are interviewed multiple times, using information from previous informants to elicit clarification and deeper responses upon re-interview. This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study. These subjective but collective understandings on a subject (ex., stratification) are often interpreted to be more significant than objective data (ex., income differentials).

It should be noted that ethnography may be approached from the point of view of art and cultural preservation, and as a descriptive rather than analytic endeavor. The comments here, however, focus on social science analytic aspects. In this focus, ethnography is a branch of cultural anthropology.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://dictionary.reference.com/
http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/garson/PA765/ethno.htm
http://hbr.org/2009/03/ethnographic-research-a-key-to-strategy/ar/1
http://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/ERCb.htm