Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence

Overview

This program supports research on strategies to improve the use of research evidence in way 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.

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.

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. 

We welcome studies that pursue one of three aims:

1. 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.

○ 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.

2. 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.

○ 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.

3. 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.

○ 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.

• 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?

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.

We 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.

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.

2024 Deadlines
Major Research Grants January 10  |  May 1  |  August 7  (3:00pm ET)   
Officers' Research Grants January 10  |  August 7  (3:00pm ET)