Epistemic cultures, knowledge types, and disciplinary tensions in population health research: An international...

Population health research involves multiple disciplines including epidemiology, economics, biostatistics, health promotion, and social sciences. Disciplinary differences are widely acknowledged but rarely analysed, leaving the nature and source of interdisciplinary tension underspecified. Drawing on the concept of epistemic cultures and interviews with 45 international researchers sampled from a bibliometric network of health equity scholars, I investigate whether distinct epistemic cultures exist within population health research, and identify specific features underpinning reported interdisciplinary tensions. Analysis identified four distinct knowledge types: knowledge about society, knowledge about disease, knowledge about behaviour, and knowledge about how to get knowledge ('negative knowledge'). These were associated with particular epistemic virtues, conceptualisations of health, and long-term goals. Three corresponded with epistemological styles previously described by Lamont; the fourth, directed at the apparatus of inquiry itself, fell outside this framework. What interviewees described as 'disciplinary differences' comprised a connected set of tensions across knowledge types, classification strengths, collection codes, and tolerance for complexity. Evaluative terms such as 'new', 'useful', and 'progress' did not carry consistent meanings across cultures, contributing to frustration and misrecognition in interdisciplinary collaboration. Written academic genres were a significant source of tension, reflecting the ways journals embed and reproduce disciplinary norms. The epistemic cultures identified were not independent: epidemiology's paradigmatic dominance exerts normative force, shaping the questions researchers ask and the form of acceptable answers. These differences have substance - they are specifiable, empirically grounded, and analytically decomposable - and they have consequences, for the questions researchers ask, the knowledge they produce, and their capacity to collaborate.