Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence

Overview

<p class="btn btn-gold btn-block"><strong>Update for 2022 Competition Cycles</strong></p> <p>NSF released a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) on December 27, 2021 (<a href="https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22035/nsf22035.jsp?WT.mc_ev=click&WT.m… Colleague Letter: NSF and William T. Grant Foundation Partnership to Increase the Use, Usefulness, and Impact of Research about Youth - NSF 22-035</a>). Proposals may be submitted to either NSF or WT Grant. Proposers can submit to both organizations only if the proposed activities submitted to each organization are unique, respectively, and are not redundant. Investigators interested in submitting proposals to NSF should follow the proposal preparation guidelines contained in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) and submit proposals to the Science of Science: Discovery, Communication, and Impact (SoS:DCI) program. To designate the proposal as being related to this collaborative research topic, include “WTG:” at the beginning of the proposal title. Proposal submissions to NSF in response to this DCL are accepted anytime. Proposers will be required to select a target date in NSF’s proposal submission systems and should choose the next upcoming target date option. Investigators submitting to WT Grant should submit proposals to the Improving the Use of Research Evidence initiative. The upcoming deadlines for applications for research grants addressing this topic are January 12, May 4, and August 3, 2022, at 3 p.m. Eastern time. Successful research proposals submitted to NSF will have scientifically sound research plans that are explicitly rooted in relevant theory and literature. Proposals will be evaluated using the standard National Science Board approved merit review criteria of intellectual merit and broader impacts, as well as their potential contribution to increasing the use, usefulness, and impact of research about youth. Questions about this DCL should be directed to the SOS:DCI Program Officer Mary Feeney, <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>.</p&gt; <p><strong>Summary</strong><br>This program supports research on strategies to improve the use of research evidence in ways that benefit young people ages 5-25 in the United States. We want to know what it takes to produce useful research evidence, what it takes to get research used, and what happens when research is used. We welcome letters of inquiry for studies that pursue one of these broad aims. We invite studies from a range of disciplines, fields, and methods, and we encourage investigations into various youth-serving systems, including justice, housing, child welfare, mental health, and education. Previous studies have drawn on conceptual and empirical work from political science, communication science, knowledge mobilization, implementation science, and organizational psychology, among other areas.</p> <p>In addition to studies that build and test theory, we are interested in measurement studies to develop the tools necessary to capture changes in the nature and degree of research use. Finally, we welcome critical perspectives that inform studies’ research questions, methods, and interpretation of findings.</p> <p>We are particularly interested in research on ways to improve the use of research evidence by state and local policymakers, mid-level managers, and intermediaries. These decision-makers play important roles in deciding which programs, practices, and tools to adopt; deliberating ways to improve existing services; shaping the conditions for implementation; and making resource allocation decisions.</p> <p>We welcome studies that pursue one of three aims:</p> <p>1. Building, identifying, or testing ways to improve the use of existing research evidence. This may include:<br>• Studies of strategies, mechanisms, or conditions that foster more routine and constructive uses of existing research evidence by decision-makers.<br>• Studies that test the effects of deliberate efforts to improve routine and beneficial uses of research in decision-making.<br>○ For example, prior work suggests that decision-makers often lack the institutional resources and requisite skills to seek out and apply research, and certain organizational norms and routines can help overcome those barriers. Studies might examine efforts to alter the decision-making environment by comparing the effectiveness of different ways (e.g., technical assistance, research-practice partnerships, cross-agency teams, etc.) to connect existing research with decision-makers, or by exploiting natural variation across decision-making environments to identify the conditions that improve research use.</p> <p>2. Building, identifying, or testing ways to facilitate the production of new research evidence that responds to decision-makers’ needs. This may include:<br>• 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.<br>• Studies to identify the relationships and organizational structures that lead to the prioritization of decision-makers’ needs in developing research agendas.<br>• Studies that examine ways to optimize organized collaborations among researchers, decision-makers, intermediaries, and other stakeholders to benefit youth.<br>○ For example, one might investigate the effectiveness of funders’ efforts to incentivize joint work between researchers and decision-makers. Others might test curriculum and training initiatives that develop researchers’ capacity to conduct collaborative work with practitioners.</p> <p>3. Testing whether and under what conditions using research evidence improves decision-making and youth outcomes. This may include:<br>• Studies that examine the impact of research use on youth outcomes and the conditions under which using research evidence improves outcomes.<br>○ The notion that using research will improve youth outcomes is a longstanding assumption, but there is little evidence to validate it. We 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.</p> <p>• Studies to identify and test other conditions under which using research evidence improves youth outcomes.<br>○ 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?</p> <p>NOTE: We are particularly interested in research on ways to improve the use of research evidence by state and local policymakers, mid-level managers, and intermediaries. These decision-makers play important roles in deciding which programs, practices, and tools to adopt; deliberating ways to improve existing services; shaping the conditions for implementation; and making resource allocation decisions.</p> <p>These research interests call for a range of methods, including experimental or observational research designs, comparative case studies, or systematic reviews. Where appropriate, consider using existing methods, measures, and analytic tools for assessing research use so that your findings can be compared and aggregated across studies (see Gitomer and Crouse [2019] Studying the Use of Research Evidence: A Review of Methods. Existing measures may not be well-suited for some inquiries, so you may also propose to adapt existing measures or develop new ones. We strongly encourage applicants to utilize a new open-access methods and measures repository that shares existing protocols for collecting and analyzing data on research us. Mixed methods studies that collect and integrate multiple types of data may be particularly advantageous given the difficulty of relying solely on self-report methods to study evidence use in complex deliberations and decision-making contexts.</p>