Grant writing: What makes social science research ideas fundable?

From idea to grant proposal: empirical research projects in the social sciences

Why funding?

Funding allows researchers the time, space, and materials to execute a research idea. Grant proposals communicate the research idea to the funding agency who awards the grant and to the scientists who review the proposal.

Are all ideas fundable?

No.

Not all research ideas need funding to turn them into high-quality research projects and publications. Some ideas can be executed with extant data (European Social Survey, or repositories of qualitative research, and so on).

Some ideas require funding in order to be conducted. They require collection of data, or transfigurations of extant data, or specialized methods that need to be developed in order to analyze extant data. Oftentimes, these ideas need a team to properly conduct them.

In the “ideas that require funding” category are PhD and Post-Doc grants — these are grants to pay a single person who, if given funding they could properly execute the idea. Generally, there must be some kind of data that needs to be collected, changed, or analyzed.

Innovative vs. incremental

Some of these ideas are risky, in that they are innovative (new and improved ideas or methods that adds value or solves existing problems in a different or more effective way than before) and there is a chance that the idea cannot be fully executed; some ideas are incremental, taking a well-known idea and improving it slightly. Some ideas are in the middle of innovation and incremental.

What makes an idea fundable, meaning that a committee would award economic resources to it?

Ultimately, whether the funding agency awards it. The same logic can be applied to art: it is art if it is in an art museum. People and organizations are the gatekeepers: when people and organizations deem your research project as worthy of funding, then it is fundable. This is not helpful if you want to know whether your idea has a chance at funding.

A fundable research idea is one in which the committee — the people and organizations — sees it as high quality, feasible, would make a strong contribution to the literature, would require funding in order to execute it, and recognizes the applicant as the right person to conduct the project. If this is correct, then it is incumbent upon the grant writer to convince the committee that the project meets the criteria.

Here are some general conditions for a fundable project

There is no one type of empirical research idea in the social sciences that is better than others. “Winning” a grant depends on a multitude of factors that change across time and funding agencies, but, ultimately, it depends on whether the committee reading the proposal agrees that funding is necessary for the project’s execution and evaluates it highly.

There must be a knowledge gap (concepts, theory, data, methods, national importance) and a research question or objective that fills that gap. I.e. the contribution is obviously strong.

The knowledge and question should address a major social issue or, for psychology, a fundamental aspect of human behavior. It would be helpful if the question is considered to be major by a sizable proportion of the scientific community or the population.

The issue to be addressed has a literature that has partially addressed it, but there are clear gaps in it, or major societal or scientific debates on it. (knowledge gaps can be resolving a scientific debate) The proposal would address this gap or debate. Something without a literature dedicated to it would be risky, at best.

The phenomenon is so new, yet so clearly important, that funding would open a new avenue of research or needs urgent address.

Joshua K. Dubrow is a PhD from The Ohio State University and a Professor of Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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