Promises and Challenges of Working With a Multidisciplinary Team

Though funding opportunities and policies emphasize the importance of empirically supported treatments in psychology, most interventions never reach the people who need them. In fact, only 14% reach their intended populations (Balas & Boren, 2000).

Many experts have pointed to barriers that make it challenging to adopt and sustain evidence-based interventions (e.g., Latessa, 2004), such as translating new programs into overstretched systems that already have their own infrastructures and missions. This is particularly true when scholars from one discipline develop an intervention that is meant to be used by practitioners in another. For these reasons, collaborative and multidisciplinary partnerships can be a powerful way to leverage multiple areas of expertise and create interventions that reach people more effectively. It is important to plan for adoption by real-world communities from the start of intervention development.

The writers of this piece are clinical psychologists at The Family Institute at Northwestern University who research intimate partner violence. Here, we describe our experience of working on a multidisciplinary team during the development and implementation of an intervention designed to reduce intimate partner violence, called Achieving Change Through Value-based Behavior (ACTV-3: Lawrence et al., 2025). We offer practical takeaways for clinical psychologists collaborating with team members from other disciplines.

Using a multidisciplinary approach

Intimate partner violence is a serious public health issue that affects millions of individuals each year. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that lifetime prevalence rates of sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner are approximately 41% for women and 26% for men (Leemis et al., 2022). Intimate partner violence is associated with myriad negative health outcomes (Jack et al., 2018) and mental health problems (Niolon et al., 2017), which tend to be more severe for individuals from marginalized communities (Stockman et al., 2015).

Efforts to develop a novel intervention for intimate partner violence began as a partnership between Lawrence and the Iowa Department of Corrections (IDOC) following an internal IDOC evaluation that found that existing programs in community corrections (i.e., for people living in the community on supervised release following being convicted of a crime) did little to reduce recidivism, and there was little consistency in program content across the state. The treatment-development team ultimately comprised administrators, probation officers, clinical psychology and public health faculty, current program facilitators, judges, and victim advocates.

Clinical psychologists on the team provided expertise in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which was the guiding framework for the intervention. They adapted traditional ACT concepts and strategies to specifically target intimate partner violence and developed aspects of the intervention focused on increasing value-based behavior (i.e., making choices that align with the kind of life you want for yourself), cognitive “defusion” (i.e., distancing yourself from unhelpful or upsetting thoughts), and decreasing experiential avoidance (i.e., doing things to control or get rid of uncomfortable feelings).

Criminal justice practitioners helped shape the language to be more in line with community corrections, and they provided expertise during the development of training protocols and other relevant topics for community corrections clients (e.g., parenting, substance use). Those in administrative roles at correctional institutions provided input to ensure that the intervention met state guidelines for number of sessions, hours completed, and required content. Victim advocates provided input on topics and themes that should be included based on their work with survivors.

The team met monthly over the course of 2 years to develop the treatment manual and subsequently implemented ACTV in several community corrections agencies. Since then, over the past 10 years, ACTV has been implemented in two other states, and several studies have supported its effectiveness (e.g., Lawrence et al., 2021).

Along the way, we have had to continually adapt the format of ACTV for new settings and contexts, such as creating a virtual version during the COVID-19 pandemic. The experience has shown us the many strengths—and some challenges—of working on multidisciplinary teams.

Promises and challenges of multidisciplinary work

Multidisciplinary partnerships can be fruitful for all clinical psychologists regardless of where their research falls in the clinical intervention pipeline. Our work often shares borders with medicine, neuroscience, public health, economics, and mathematics, to name a few. Leveraging knowledge from these neighboring and overlapping areas of expertise strengthens our science and allows us to build on what clinical psychology alone can offer.

By expanding our work to include theories and frameworks from other disciplines, as well as engaging in the simple process of brainstorming with researchers from other backgrounds, we were able to be more creative and generative as scientists. These partnerships also allowed us to translate an intervention from bench to bedside in a far more efficient timeframe than is typical of clinical science. This last point is perhaps the most compelling one and makes a strong case for the need for these partnerships to bring research from the ivory tower into the hands of the communities who need it.

The promise offered by these types of partnerships is not without its share of challenges. Inviting experts from other fields into our research process (and vice versa) means losing control of the design and execution of the work. Different stakeholders may have different priorities or goals for the intervention. For example, early in the development of the intervention, team members from the IDOC expressed that the program should place more emphasis on holding group members accountable for the crimes they had committed. Other examples include disagreement on the ways outcomes were measured and how various disciplines define success. For example, a health economist may be more focused on the cost-effectiveness of an intervention, criminal justice staff or advocates may prioritize administrative criminal records (e.g., recidivism), and clinical psychologists may be interested in observable changes in behavior.

An additional challenge of maintaining these partnerships is turnover in leadership, which happens often in the settings of our team members. When new individuals take on leadership roles, there can be a shift in terms of agency goals, initiatives, allocation of resources, and beliefs about which initiatives are going to be most effective. These shifts also create the need to build new relationships and trust, which are not necessarily inherited from predecessors. Without trust and strong interpersonal relationships, a previously established partnership with an organization can quickly fall apart.

Finally, in translational work, there is often tension between delivering interventions as prescribed by researchers and needing to adapt them to make an intervention workable in the real world. For our team, these modifications included shifting between offering treatment sessions once versus twice per week depending on facilitator and client availability, offering sessions online, and creating modified manuals for community agencies versus correctional settings. These adaptations often required us to use a more flexible approach than we typically would for clinical efficacy studies, while still adhering to principles of rigorous scientific design.

Collaborating across disciplines is key for progressing psychological science. We argue that creating opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration is the key to increasing access to interventions that work.

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