Interdisciplinary Research Is Hard and Other Lessons from Debt’s Grip

This symposium spotlights recent book-length treatments of household finance. Its organizers asked us to write an essay that would add to our recently published book, Debt’s Grip. At first, we were at a loss. The book documents what it means to live in financial precarity after decades of risk shifting onto households in the United States.

We had spent a couple of years writing the book, which in turn is built on over a decade of teamwork in data collection. If we had something more to say, we would have said it in the book. For those looking for new data, we must refer you to the book. In this essay, instead of focusing on our research findings in Debt’s Grip, we discuss working together as an interdisciplinary research team to build upon a project that has survived for more than four decades.

Debt’s Grip illustrates how interdisciplinary collaboration creates knowledge that otherwise would not occur and the challenges of making a long-term collaboration work.