Practical Steps for Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Educational Research: Studying Wellbeing in the Kazakhstani School Context

The purpose of this article is to explain our experience and steps taken to enhance our cross-cultural educational research study. The work is informed by the collective experiences of seven primary researchers from multiple disciplinary and geographic backgrounds examining the socio-educational topic of students’ wellbeing in Kazakhstan. From the ongoing longitudinal study (2014-2017), we found practical steps to enhance our understanding of students’ wellbeing by moving from a multidisciplinary understanding of the topic into an interdisciplinary educational research approach. In the article, we provide (1) a general description of the variances between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and research. This will then ground our discussion of (2) recent and ongoing research in Central Asia including our students’ wellbeing study, (3) how interdisciplinary research helped us to understand our positionality and enhanced the level of trust and socio-linguistic translations in the study; and (4) guiding practical steps for creating interdisciplinary research.