Daniel Stokols

• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at University of California, Irvine

A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collecti...

A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collecti...

Human population and energy use have increased rapidly in recent centuries. This growth has relied on Homo sapiens appropriating ecosystem services previously shared more equitably with many other species. Envisioning this process as a transfer of ecological wealth among species provides a framework within which to examine human activities. We use...

Emerging Directions in the ‘Science of Team Science’: An Interview with Professor Daniel Stokols

This special volume of Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies is the first volume of critical essays on the work of scholar Julie Thompson Klein. Guest edited by Tanya Augsburg

In the early twenty-first century, many have lamented the lack of a sufficient scientific workforce capable of contributing to the modern knowledge-intensive economy. At the same time, others have noted the lack of a scientific workforce capable of collaborating across scientific disciplines. The combination of these factors leads to a need to bett...

The majority of humans reside in urban regions and spend most of their time in indoor environments such as residential, educational, occupational, transportation, and health-care facilities. Interior settings affect occupants’ health and behavior through their design, and chemical, microbial, and social features. The initial portion of this paper d...

In privileging expert risk assessments, we may be failing to recognize the authenticity of a community’s actual experience of risk. We should remind ourselves that expert measures are always only partial, often surrogate, estimates of such experience and, at times, may fail to capture the actual nature of risk. There is a need for modes of analysis...

We report a qualitative study of ICT (information and communication technology) use among a group of homeless people on Skid Row, Los Angeles. Participants in our ethnographic study frequently used mobile phones and computers, but not for the purposes documented in other studies such as managing friendships, enlisting family support, finding housin...

Ecology pertains broadly to the relationships between organisms and their environments. The field of ecology and health examines the influence of conditions in the physical and sociocultural environment on the physiological, social, and emotional well-being of individuals and groups. The present article traces the development of research on ecology...

New forms of infrastructure are needed in a world characterized by the burdens of global climate change, a growing population, increasing socio-technical complexity, and natural and human stressors to our human systems. Enabling communities to transition to a more resilient configuration of infrastructures is crucial for establishing a distributed...

The collaborative success of cross-disciplinary scientific teams depends in part on the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intellectual orientations individual team members bring to the group. This paper extends earlier conceptualizations of Transdisciplinary Orientation (TDO)-defined as the values, attitudes, beliefs, conceptual skills and knowledg...

Providing households with energy feedback is widely promoted as a conservation strategy and its effectiveness has been established in field studies. However, such studies actively recruit participants and little is known about naturalistic consumers. Despite hundreds of products emerging, few have taken hold in the market. Diffusion of innovation i...

Science is increasingly being carried out in large cross-disciplinary research teams. However, currently little empirical research focused on understanding the outcomes and added-value associated with this type of research approach exists. This study utilizes a scientific mapping technique to compare the structure and topical coverage of publicatio...

Residential energy conservation is among the most efficient means of reducing emissions, yet behavior is lagging behind this potential, suggesting this is an area where psychology can contribute. Research suggests that conservation behaviors may cluster into distinct dimensions, and a greater understanding of these differences could improve interve...

The National Cancer Institute has been a leader in supporting transdisciplinary (TD) team science. From 2005-2010, the NCI supported Transdisciplinary Research on Energetic and Cancer I (TREC I), a center initiative fostering the TD integration of social, behavioral, and biological sciences to examine the relationships among obesity, nutrition, phy...

Background: In an earlier experiment Misra, Stokols, & Marino (2012) found that participants who received a descriptive normative prompt in the message requesting them to complete an online survey were more likely to comply with the request compared to participants who did not receive any normative prompts. Purpose: Building on that earlier study,...

The health status of individuals and groups is influenced by a wide array of factors. In 2000 a landmark publication, Promoting Human Wellness’ edited by Jamner-Schneider and Stokols, provided compelling evidence of the “complex web of interrelated influences that operate dynamically to determine health and wellness” (p. 1). Thirteen years later, i...

Resilience studies build on the notion that phenomena in the real world should be understood as dynamic social-ecological systems. However, the scholarly community may not be fully aware that social ecology, as a conceptual framework, has a long intellectual history, nor fully cognizant of its foundational theory. In this article, we trace the inte...

The complexity of social and public health challenges has led to burgeoning interest and investments in cross-disciplinary team-based research, and particularly in transdisciplinary (TD) team-based research. TD research aims to integrate and ultimately extend beyond discipline-specific concepts, approaches, and methods to accelerate innovations and...

Over the past several decades, there has been burgeoning interest and investment in large transdisciplinary (TD) team science initiatives that aim to address complex societal problems. Despite this trend, TD training opportunities in the health sciences remain limited, and evaluations of these opportunities are even more uncommon due to funding con...

This paper introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding people–environment transactions as they occur within the hybrid and polyfunctional settings (settings that incorporate both physical and digital elements) of the Twenty-First century. Four alternative modes of environmental experience with respect to individuals' connectedness to re...

The rapid growth and transmission of information in the digital age poses new challenges for individuals coping with the onslaught of communications from multiple sources. This research (a) conceptualizes and measures perceived information overload from cyber-based and place-based sources, (b) tests the reliability and validity of a newly developed...

Residential energy conservation is among the most efficient means of reduc- ing emissions, yet behavior is lagging behind this potential, suggesting this is an area where psychology can contribute. Research suggests that conservation behaviors may cluster into distinct dimensions, and a greater understanding of these differences could improve inter...

A field experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of norm-based persuasive messages for increasing response rates in online survey research. Participants in an interdisciplinary conference were asked to complete two successive postconference surveys and randomly assigned to one of two groups at each time point. The experimental group recei...

Large cross-disciplinary scientific teams are becoming increasingly prominent in the conduct of research. This paper reports on a quasi-experimental longitudinal study conducted to compare bibliometric indicators of scientific collaboration, productivity, and impact of center-based transdisciplinary team science initiatives and traditional investig...

Research on the links between health behaviors and cancer may benefit significantly from cross-disciplinary team science approaches that integrate concepts and methods from diverse fields. Enabling these approaches is expected to accelerate scientific innovation and the translation of research to practice and policy. The National Cancer Institute (...

The malaria and AIDS epidemics, rising cancer, diabetes, and obesity rates are but some of the tremendously complex global health challenges of the twenty-first century. Since these challenges do not lie in the domain of any one academic discipline, many scholars have recognized that if they are to be tackled effectively, a new generation of scient...

An increase in cross-disciplinary, collaborative team science initiatives over the last few decades has spurred interest by multiple stakeholder groups in empirical research on scientific teams, giving rise to an emergent field referred to as the science of team science (SciTS). This study employed a collaborative team science concept-mapping evalu...

reconciling local plural design projects with the exigen-cies of the regional and global contexts in which they are embedded are often substantial (Deming and Palmer 2005; Thering and Chanse 2011). As the geographical and organizational scope of action- oriented research expands, the complexities of facilitating participation and coordinating effor...

To date, most efforts to define social entrepreneurship have focused on adapting existing management theories on entrepreneurship and non-profits rather than distinguishing the organisational purposes and structure of social entrepreneurship from traditional for-profit organisations. There is little consensus among academicians and practitioners al...

It has been widely acknowledged in recent years that if we are to achieve a coherent comprehension of the world and its enormous social, environmental, and public health problems we must make linkages between bodies of scientific knowledge and the social and political realities that generate them. Nearly eight decades after Spanish philosopher Orte...

The First Annual International Science of Team Science (SciTS) Conference was held in Chicago, IL April 22-24, 2010. This article presents a summary of the Conference proceedings.

This Commentary describes recent research progress and professional developments in the study of scientific teamwork, an area of inquiry termed the "science of team science" (SciTS, pronounced "sahyts"). It proposes a systems perspective that incorporates a mixed-methods approach to SciTS that is commensurate with the conceptual, methodological, an...

There is a pressing need to more deeply understand how incompatible land-use patterns intersect with place attachment and experiences of environmental injustice. While environmental policy is strongly influenced by the classic, probabilistic model of environmental risk, the present research instead aims to develop notions of environmental impact th...

Over the past two decades, the US government has devoted signifi cant fi nancial resources to the creation of large-scale team research projects, many of which involve hundreds of scientists working together from a wide range of different fi elds. In the health arena, some initiatives such as the Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers (TTUR...

Recent technological, geophysical, and societal forces have fundamentally altered the structure and functioning of human environments. Prominent among these forces are the rise of the Internet; rapid rates of global environmental change; and widening rifts among different socioeconomic, racial, religious, and ethnic groups. The present article trac...

The University of California at Irvine Interdisciplinary Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (ID-SURE) program had three objectives: (1) designing an interdisciplinary health promotion training curriculum for undergraduate research fellows; (2) developing measures for evaluating and assessing program-related educational processes and products;...

Teams of scientists representing diverse disciplines are often brought together for purposes of better understanding and, ultimately, resolving urgent public health and environmental problems. Likewise, the emerging field of the science of team science draws on diverse disciplinary perspectives to better understand and enhance the processes and out...

As the science of team science evolves, the development of measures that assess important processes related to working in transdisciplinary teams is critical. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present the psychometric properties of scales measuring collaborative processes and transdisciplinary integration. Two hundred-sixteen researchers a...

Growing interest in promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration among health scientists has prompted several federal agencies, including the NIH, to establish large, multicenter initiatives intended to foster collaborative research and training. In order to assess whether these initiatives are effective in promoting scientific collaboration that ult...

The science of team science encompasses an amalgam of conceptual and methodologic strategies aimed at understanding and enhancing the outcomes of large-scale collaborative research and training programs. This field has emerged rapidly in recent years, largely in response to growing concerns about the cost effectiveness of public- and private-sector...

Increased public and private investments in large-scale team science initiatives over the past two decades have underscored the need to better understand how contextual factors influence the effectiveness of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration. Toward that goal, the findings from four distinct areas of research on team performance and collab...

Purpose As the science of team science evolves, the development of measures that assess important processes related to working in transdisciplinary teams is critical. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present the psychometric properties of scales measuring ...

This paper offers a conceptual framework for establishing a science of transdisciplinary action research. Lewin's (1951) concept of action research highlights the scientific and societal value of translating psychological research into community problem-solving strategies. Implicit in Lewin's formulation is the importance of achieving effective col...

Black American men continue to suffer disproportionately from epidemically higher rates of prostate cancer. We hypothesize that complex reasons for persistently higher death rates of prostate cancer in this group are steeped in social factors associated with health access. We utilized data from the It's All About U prostate cancer prevention study...

A key assumption underlying recent investments toward establishing transdisciplinary research centers and training programs is that cross-disciplinary research and training provide a stronger basis for achieving scientific and societal advances than unidisciplinary programs. It is necessary to develop reproducibleand reliable criteria for identifyi...

The past 2 decades have witnessed a surge of interest and investment in transdisciplinary research teams and centers. Only recently, however, have efforts been made to evaluate the collaborative processes and scientific and public policy outcomes of these endeavors. This paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating transdisc...

Small businesses offer one of the most challenging settings for the delivery of health promotion. The authors provide insights into the unique advantages and challenges associated with delivering health promotion in small worksites. Empirical and theoretical strategies and resources for meeting these challenges are offered and guidelines for delive...

This article offers a review of the research literature on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and presents the findings from an exploratory survey of the beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors of conventionally trained physicians toward CAM. Earlier studies of CAM focused primarily on patients' attitudes and behaviors rather than t...

Transdisciplinary scientific collaborations (TDSCs) have the potential to strengthen substance use and misuse research and prevention. Despite its growing prominence as a mode for scientific research, research on TDSC remains in a nascent form and its value to the field of substance use and misuse merits further exploration. The overarching purpose...

The past two decades have seen a growing interest and investment in transdisciplinary research teams and centers. The Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers (TTURCs) exemplify large-scale scientific collaborations undertaken for the explicit purpose of promoting novel conceptual and methodological integrations bridging two or more fields. U...

Introduction Although there is general agreement about the complex interplay among individual-, family-, organizational-, and community-level factors as they influence health outcomes, there is still a gap between health promotion research and practice. The authors suggest that a disjuncture exists between the multiple theories and models of health...

This article offers an integration of two different perspectives on health promotion research and practice: one emphasizing the concept of community capacity for health improvement and the other focusing on the notion of health supportive environments. These two approaches generally have emphasized different kinds of community assets for health pro...

This paper proposes a research strategy based on a social ecological analysis of the Internet and its psychological impact as an option to generate original research to answer the follow ing question: What is the psycho-environmental meaning of the Internet? This paper has two objectives: first, to analyze Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) link...

Research in the physical activity promotion arena has focused on the application of theoretical perspectives aimed primarily at personal levels of understanding and analysis. The investigation of such theories has provided some insights related to potentially useful mediators of physical activity behavior. However, to continue to expand this field,...

This article examines physical and social predictors of perceived support for creativity in the workplace and their effects on important personal and organizational outcomes. Recent conceptualizations of creativity suggest that the physical environment plays a key role in facilitating the development of creative processes and products, yet prior st...

Notes that the premise that people's transactions with their place-based environments are psychologically important and influential has historically been prominent in the discipline of environmental psychology. However, the authors argue that increases in technology in the 1980s and the proliferation of the Internet, World Wide Web, and computers i...

Introduction: A 2-year prospective study evaluated the effectiveness of a managerial training program to enhance corporate compliance with statewide worksite safety and health regulations. The program offered participants information about regulatory requirements and emphasized organizational and environmental strategies for reducing occupational i...

Social ecology offers a conceptual framework for understanding the etiology of multiple health problems and a basis for designing broad-gauge educational, therapeutic, and policy interventions to enhance personal and community well-being. Implications of social ecology for behavioral medicine are considered in relation to the development of diagnos...

Life in contemporary times confronts individuals with glaring disparities between the goals of achieving social cohesion and emotional wéll-being, on the one hand, and a host of political, economic, and technological circumstances that undermine those values, on the other. Efforts to cultivate cohesive families, neighborhoods, work organizations, a...

The goals of this chapter are twofold. The 1st goal is to identify convergent theoretical, methodological, and empirical themes reflected in the chapters in this book (see record 1999-02242-000). The research programs outlined in these chapters reveal critical environmental conditions and transactional processes that significantly affect developme...

Rapid technological change, global environmental concerns, and other dramatic ecological and societal changes are rendering previous conceptualizations of environments, and the relationships between environment and behavior, inadequate. Following a brief review of earlier conceptualizations of environments, distinctions between the terms context, e...