Clarity is an important practice for any collaboration. It provides the basis for communication and supports building trust. For this post, I narrow in on how clarity around roles is vital to any Research Justice, Community-based Research, and Team Science collaboration. Role clarity is important because doing collaborative work requires creating boundaries as well as an understanding of who does what. Without boundaries and an understanding of our role(s), one could easily take on more and more work, which can take us away from other important tasks that we need to accomplish or downtime we need to rejuvenate. Without this, we can get burnt out on the work, taking away our joy and, potentially, our desire to continue our involvement in such collaborations. However, beyond the individual, role clarity is also important in its ability to build trust amongst collaborative members (e.g., people take on work and are entrusted to do that work), allows for accountability, leads away from group confusion, a common stumbling block in a smooth working relationship, and, most importantly, gets the work done. This blog is rooted in my experience engaged in Community-based Research for the past two years, with the Research Justice Shop at UC Irvine. Through this experience and learning, I will emphasize the importance of role clarity by first identifying what a team science approach is, and then unpack the ways in which collaboratives can understand and get to role clarity. In Part Two of this blog, I will apply this to my experience as a Research Justice Shop Fellow, which will help give insight into team science in practice.
What is Team Science?
Team Science is a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes people from different fields in order to research specific problems and answer complex questions. Teams can be small or large but ultimately have some core guiding principles which help to minimize challenges. While Team Science does not typically include non-academics, the Research Justice Shop Fellows used a Team Science approach in our community-based research, to support community partners to engage in research with UCI Principle Investigators with a vision of enacting justice and equity in the research process. In doing so, we supported the establishment of the GREEN-MPNA/UCI collaborative. The UCI/GREEN-MPNA Collaborative is comprised of faculty from different disciplines, including Public Health, Anthropology, Law, Medicine, and Chemistry, research centers, including the Research Justice Shop, AirUCI, the UCI Environmental Law Clinic, and a community-based organization, the Madison Park Neighborhood Association – Getting Residents Engaged in Empowering Neighborhoods (GREEN-MPNA). I will first highlight the theory and best practices of team science before highlighting one key challenge often experienced in Team Science: Role Clarity. In Part Two of this blog, I will highlight how this manifested in our Team Science approach with a community partner.
In a prior blogpost, I wrote on how the Team Science approach benefited our collaborative. To help define a Team Science approach, I pull from the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the NIH Team Science Field Guide, and the Science of Team Science. Team Science is a collaborative approach toward complex research projects and scientific problems which utilizes the expertise and knowledge of a multidisciplinary group of scholars and scientists. Through leveraging a wide-ranging expertise and knowledge base, a collaborative can strengthen its analysis and be novel and innovative in its solutions. From the Collaboration & Team Science Field Guide: “Research teams also vary by size, organizational complexity, and geographic scope, ranging from as few as two individuals working together to a vast network of interdependent researchers across many institutions. Research teams have diverse goals spanning scientific discovery, training, clinical translation, public health, and health policy (Stokols, Hall, Taylor, Moser, & Syme, 2008).” These teams also vary in duration. This means that there can be many different components to a collaborative, which vary in length and time. Therefore,it is important to have clarity, organization, trust, communication, and leadership, as well as processes set up to deal with confusion, disagreement, and conflict. Without these, there can be a breakdown in group dynamics, and the collaborative may suffer or fall apart. Therefore, strong communication and management strategies are key for a successful team science collaborative, as well as a foundation of trust and clearly defined roles for collaborative members.
Roles in a research collaboration can be very structured, relatively fluid, or somewhere in between. While roles may be fixed, they can also shift with time and the development of a project. A more fluid role might shift throughout a project, people might take on multiple roles within a project, or a person’s roles might change given needs that arise within a research project. For example, an individual might be a grant writer, but also called on to help advocate at general meetings or collect data at certain times. Individual researchers may advance a project’s research agenda, but also take on the role of meeting or event coordinator. When a project ends, but the collaboration continues, people might have their roles shift or take on a different form. Roles may shift over time, which requires communication among team members about those changes.
Team Science and Role Making – Working Backwards
Team science principles propose that collaborators develop specific goals to create a work trajectory and a shared vision for a research collaboration (Collaborative and Team Science Field Guide). Without such a vision, the goals of the collaborative could get lost, and the collaborative work might be delayed or impeded. Each collaborator should have an understanding of this shared vision and the overall goals of the larger project. This will help in integrating and aligning role development into the larger project goals and vision, as well as creating unity amongst collaborators as each understands themselves as part of something larger than their role.
A team science collaboration requires several components to build effective relationships to support collaborative research. This is important because collaboration is a live process. Some of the most important aspects are trust, communication, team evolution and dynamics, recognition and sharing success, conflict and disagreement, self-awareness, and navigating and leveraging networks and systems (Collaborative and Team Science Field Guide). Team science collaborations may also foster opportunities for mentoring relationships across roles. As the image below highlights, consensus is needed around fundamental group agreements, starting from the larger goals and vision down to what happens with conflict. These are essential for any working collaboration, and working through these, one by one, will be helpful for any group that is forming or regrouping.
Healthy collaboration involves significant planning, discussion, and boundary creation to ensure that the work gets carried out in a timely manner. In order to do this, having a clearly articulated vision and/or mission statement for the collaboration is important. This vision is just as important as expected outcomes, as it outlines how collaborators plan to work together. Some questions to consider include:
- Are decisions made horizontally (by consensus) or vertically (by leaders)?
- What is the hope for a continuing relationship (is this a time-limited partnership or ongoing)?
- What is a general outline of what you hope will be accomplished within a certain timeframe?
In this way, collaborators can align the mission of the partnership with multiple projects, roles, and responsibilities. Having a clearly planned and articulated vision and statement is helpful in making explicit how each collaborative member’s role contributes towards advancing a the unifying mission and the work of the larger collaborative. Having a collaborative mission statement also helps new collaborative members to understand how the group works and where they can contribute.
After setting out the larger vision, collaborative members should outline the project that is being taken on and designate clear responsibilities. From there, project collaborators should outline the different roles that need to be filled in order to accomplish their goals. Whether roles are created prior to being filled, or the roles are created amongst the members who will be filling these positions, a key guiding principle is that members need to feel empowered within their roles and responsibilities, which is felt through having their duties and responsibilities articulated clearly. Creating/outlining roles within the vision and communication can support the co-creation of roles within collaborations.
- Creating/outlining roles within the vision
Sometimes members will create their own roles, and sometimes their roles may be created for them. However, there needs to be an understanding of how the research goals and individual responsibilities fit into the larger mission. This can, at times, be more difficult for those that come in at different points in the research process or are working on a limited part of the larger project. Therefore, each individual’s role should be mapped to the research outcomes and understood within the larger, collaborative mission. Additionally, this allows for project transparency, which ensures that each group member knows what others are accountable for doing and the responsibilities that a person may uphold in a group.
Importantly, roles should be co-created in advance to have full collaboration. Given that an individual’s roles are typically not siloed, mapping all roles can help create and show expectations for team members working together. This may be done through meetings, shared goals and outcomes documents, emails, note-taking and documenting practices, shared communications systems such as a listserv and a shared cloud drive, etc. However, roles need to be understood as intersecting and highlight working together. One might even outline roles that are not yet filled, but which they would like to be filled in the future. This also means there needs to be conversations around roles and responsibilities, delegation, and accountability. This notion of accountability is vital, however, it can be a thorny issue to deal with. Questions then arise over whose responsibility it is to check in on people and how to make sure people are doing the work they are supposed to be doing within the timeline. What happens if people are not doing the work and not communicating a need for support? In this way, the clarity of roles and responsibilities makes it easier to locate what work is connected to whose role, and able to hold collaborative members accountable for what they agreed to take on.
- Communication
Communication about roles in a Team Science setting is also key, as there can be several research activities, each at different stages of research happening at once. Therefore, teams need to agree on processes for communication, meetings, sharing information and data, and other practices. Important to this is understanding that different disciplines, organizations, and people have different styles and/or protocols for communication and sharing. Making sure people understand their roles and understand the communication protocols put in place should issues arise helps to ensure that members are on the same page, which minimizes larger issues in the future. Even after agreeing upon certain processes, you may need to continue to go over them at meetings or through emails. Additionally, be sure to identify which team members should be contacted for any questions or clarifications. Rather than randomly emailing different people, it is best to have main points of contact who act as a central base for information. This contributes to a strong functioning team.
These are my guiding thoughts on how role clarity is essential to building a trusting, grounded team science approach. While team science is an important approach to science in the university, it can uniquely be applied to collaborations with community organizations as well as university collaborators. In Part Two, I will outline how I applied this approach in my experience as a Research Justice Fellow working with GREEN-MPNA.
About the Writer
Ian Baran (he/they – ibaran@uci.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning and Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Ian was a 2020-22 Research Justice Fellow and worked with GREEN-MPNA on community-campus collaborative for Community Air Monitoring Project. Ian’s research looks at carcerality, labor organizing, environmental justice, and working-class struggles. For more information regarding the Research Justice Shop please visit the website or contact researchjustice@uci.edu or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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