Participating in a multi-site study is unlike anything else in so many ways. You do your own project; you make all the decisions. In some ways that’s really burdensome, but it’s also, you’re in charge. You have the power. When you work collaboratively, especially in a high stakes project which everybody has a strong investment in, that’s not necessarily easy to collaborate on, because people have different points of view, and I think there are a couple of things important to consider.

One is that you’re not going to “win all the battles,” and you shouldn’t try to. And you should know what really matters to you and what else you just have opinions on. And you should feel free to express those opinions, but not if you would fight to prevail.

Now the question is: Should you fight at all? I think one of the successes of our large project [the NICHD Study of Early Child Care] has been that we’ve had constructive conflict as opposed to we’ve avoided it. Now that’s been difficult and trying, but in the final analysis I think we ended up with what I like to describe as short term costs in terms of the conflict and the tension and long term gains in terms of the quality of the product and the productivity.

I think all too often in collaborations it ends up more like what little kids do. They parallel play. I do my thing, you do your thing and you don’t get a whole greater than the sum of the parts. It’s just the sum of the parts. If you’re willing to bang heads a little bit intellectually, it doesn’t have to be hostilely, but it’s just sort of people have different points of view and therefore wrestle and to some extent struggle I think in the final analysis you reap more benefit, and it’s worth that cost.