Research Grants on Improving Use of Research Evidence – United States

Deadline: 2-Aug-23

The William T. Grant Foundation is seeking applications for Research Grants to support research on strategies to improve the use of research evidence in ways that benefit young people ages 5-25 in the United States.

The William T. Grant Foundation invite studies from a range of disciplines, fields, and methods, and they encourage investigations into various youth-serving systems, including justice, housing, child welfare, mental health, and education.

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 and under what conditions using research evidence improves 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. 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.

Awards

• 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 and 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.

Eligible Projects

• Where appropriate, they value projects that:
  • harness the learning potential of mixed methods and interdisciplinary work;
  • involve practitioners or policymakers in meaningful ways to shape the research questions;
  • interpret preliminary and final results, and communicate their implications for policy and practice;
  • combine senior and junior staff in ways that facilitate mentoring of junior staff;
  • are led by members of racial or ethnic groups underrepresented in academic fields;
  • generate data useful to other researchers and make such data available for public use;
  • demonstrate significant creativity and potential to advance the field, for example by;
  • introducing new research paradigms or extending existing methods, measures and analytic tools to allow for comparison across studies.

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 (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Alaska Native-Serving Institutions, Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs).
• 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 :
    • align with the stated research interests of this program and;
    • 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.