Diversity and Interdisciplinarity: How Can One Distinguish and Recombine Disparity, Variety, and Balance?

TL;DR

This paper clarifies how to distinguish and measure the components of diversity—variety, balance, and disparity—using independent indicators, enhancing the empirical resolution of diversity assessments.

Contribution

It introduces a method to separately operationalize and measure the three components of diversity, improving upon previous combined approaches.

Findings

Gini coefficient effectively measures balance

Relative variety can be independently operationalized

New diversity indicator offers higher empirical resolution

Abstract

The dilemma which remained unsolved using Rao-Stirling diversity, namely of how variety and balance can be combined into "dual concept diversity" (Stirling, 1998, pp. 48f.) can be clarified by using Nijssen et al.'s (1998) argument that the Gini coefficient is a perfect indicator of balance. However, the Gini coefficient is not an indicator of variety; this latter term can be operationalized independently as relative variety. The three components of diversity--variety, balance, and disparity--can thus be clearly distinguished and independently operationalized as measures varying between zero and one. The new diversity indicator ranges with more resolving power in the empirical case.