Hello Rameses group:
I'm a long time lurker at a northeastern US university. I've got what I think is a fairly concrete problem that I could use some help with.
We are evaluating grant applications for internal university grants, and having the faculty submit proposals following NIH guidelines.
These are young faculty and so do not have a ton of experience with grant writing. As a member of our school's committee on research, I'm providing support (templates, examples, etc.) to the applicants. However, I have not been able to find any good examples of grants (or grant proposal guidelines) that incorporate realist or complexity theoretic principles into the research evaluation plan (most all the examples are either for controlled trials or large epi studies).
We have a subset of applicants that (a) are interested in more complex program or initiative evaluation projects, and (b) are not conversant (except the work I have shared with them...much coming from this listserve) with realist or complexity theoretic concepts (e.g., emergence or recursivity). (Remember, these are both new researchers and American healthcare researchers.) Thus, they are at a bit of a loss as to how to formulate a research plan that can coherently (and briefly) incorporate such things as change of theoretic framework, criteria for identifying when sui generis phenomena have emerged (hence, what new variables and relationships may need to be measured that were not measured before), etc.
And, since the templates we have available "fit" the classic highly controlled format, this (unintendedly and surreptitiously) puts some of the faculty at a distinct advantage. What I'd like to do is even the playing field a bit to erase (or at least decrease) the proposal evaluation disadvantage of our colleagues who (intuitively) appear to have a predisposition toward more realist or complexity frames.
So, if anyone knows of any grant proposal "templates" (or even successful NIH grant applications) that could help our evaluation committee evaluate these types of proposals, we would greatly appreciate it.
Scott
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