Development of a measure to evaluate competence perceptions of natural and social science

Interdisciplinary scientific research teams are essential for responding to society’s complex scientific and social issues. Perceptual barriers to collaboration can inhibit the productivity of teams crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries. To explore these perceptual barriers, survey measures related to perceived competence were developed and validated with a population of earth scientists (n = 449) ranging from undergraduates through professionals. Resulting competence scales included three factors that we labeled as Perceived Respect (PR), Perceived Methodological Rigor (PM), and Perceived Intelligence (Pi). A Mann-Whitney U test revealed that earth scientists perceived social science/scientists as significantly less competent than natural science/scientists. A multivariate multilevel analysis indicated that women perceived scientists as more intelligent than did men. Working with social scientists and holding an earth science PhD changed earth scientists’ perceptions of social science on multiple scales. Our study indicates that competence in scientific disciplines is a multidimensional construct. Our results from earth scientists also indicate that perceptual barriers towards other scientific disciplines should be studied further as interdisciplinarity in scientific research continues to be encouraged as a solution to many socio-scientific problems.