Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence in US

Deadline: 07-Aug-24

The William T. Grant Foundation is inviting applications to support research on strategies focused on improving the use, usefulness, and impact of evidence in ways that benefit young people ages 5-25 in the United States.

This program funds research studies that advance theory and build empirical knowledge on ways to improve the use of research evidence by policymakers, agency leaders, organizational managers, intermediaries, and other decision-makers that shape youth-serving systems in the United States.

Aims

• Proposed studies must pursue one of the following aims:
  • Building, identifying, or testing ways to improve the use of existing research evidence
    • This may include:
      • Studies of strategies, mechanisms, or conditions that foster more routine and constructive uses of existing research evidence by decision-makers.
      • Studies that test the effects of deliberate efforts to improve routine and beneficial uses of research in decision-making.
  • Building, identifying, or testing ways to facilitate the production of new research evidence that responds to decision-makers’ needs 
    • This may include:
      • Studies to identify strategies for altering the incentive structures or organizational cultures of research institutions so that researchers conduct more practice- or policy-relevant studies and are rewarded for producing research that decision-makers consider useful.
      • Studies to identify the relationships and organizational structures that lead to the prioritization of decision-makers’ needs in developing research agendas.
      • Studies that examine ways to optimize organized collaborations among researchers, decision-makers, intermediaries, and other stakeholders to benefit youth.
  • Testing whether strategies that improve the use of research evidence in turn improve decision-making and youth outcomes
    • This may include:
      • Studies that examine the impact of research use on youth outcomes and the conditions under which using research evidence improves outcomes.
        • The notion that using research will improve youth outcomes is a longstanding assumption, but there is little evidence to validate it. They suspect that the impact of research on outcomes may depend on a number of conditions, including the quality of the research and the quality of research use. One hypothesis is that the quality of the research and the quality of research use will work synergistically to yield strong outcomes for youth.
      • Studies to identify and test other conditions under which using research evidence improves youth outcomes.
        • For example, recent federal policies have instituted mandates and incentives to increase the adoption of programs with evidence of effectiveness from randomized controlled trials, with the expectation that the use of these programs will lead to better outcomes. Do these policies actually increase the use of those programs and improve child outcomes?

Grant Categories

• Major Research Grants 
  • $100,000 to $1,000,000 over 2-4 years, including up to 15% indirect costs.
  • Studies involving secondary data analysis are at the lower end of the range (about $100,000-$300,000), whereas studies that involve new data collection can have larger budgets (typically $300,000-$600,000). Generally, only proposals to launch experiments in which settings (e.g., schools, child welfare agencies, justice settings) are randomly assigned to conditions are eligible for funding above $600,000.
• Officers’ Research Grants 
  • $25,000–$50,000 over 1-2 years, including up to 15% indirect costs.
  • Studies may be stand-alone projects or may build off larger projects. The budget should be appropriate for the activities proposed.

Eligibility Criteria

• Eligible Organizations
  • The Foundation makes grants only to tax-exempt organizations. They do not make grants to individuals.
  • They encourage proposals from organizations that are under-represented among grantee institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Alaska NativeServing Institutions, Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions.
• Eligible Principal Investigators 
  • The Foundation defers to the applying organization’s criteria for who is eligible to act as a Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on a grant. In general, they expect that all investigators will have the experience and skills to carry out the proposed work.
  • They strive to support a diverse group of researchers in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and seniority, and they encourage research projects led by Black or African American, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or Asian or Pacific Islander American researchers.
• Eligible Studies 
  • Only studies that 1) align with the stated research interests of this program and 2) relate to the outcomes of young people between the ages of 5 and 25 in the United States are eligible for consideration.
  • They do not support non-research activities such as program implementation and operational costs, or make contributions to building funds, fundraising drives, endowment funds, general operating budgets, or scholarships. Applications for ineligible projects are screened out without further review.

For more information, visit William T. Grant Foundation.