Collaboration in the context of integration: a Social Dominance Experiment

How does one go about asking for opinions from participants about ‘health and social care integration’? As this ‘concept of integration’ is relatively vague and ambiguous. Indeed, in an earlier project we found that people that work in the social care sector really favoured closer collaboration, whereas healthcare colleagues really did not care much about such collaboration. This impression is merely anecdotal in nature, how does one tease out an individual’s preference for collaboration. In short, we have decided to use the empathy scale from the well- established Social Dominance Orientation scales, to use as a proxy for ‘willingness to collaborate’. Essentially, the assumption made here is; if a participant indicates a higher level of empathy then they are more likely to collaborate with others. It follows from this assumption that those more likely to collaborate are more like to want to integrate. It is this logic that has been applied to the creation of this experiment and we anticipate that this will be a contentious point. We would like to point out that, even though on its own, this may be a precarious assumption to make. However, this experimental study should be seen in light of the wider dissertation and the wider study design context in which it operates.