Money
for Nothing? Well, Not Quite!
Advancing the ‘Value’ of Your Research Project
Applying for Research Grants are part of the academic right of passage –
an exercise many of us go through, too many times. Seeking contributory funding
to support research, but to also bring revenue to our department, enable us to
recruit and hire research assistants, or offer targeted PhD positions and
scholarships, not to mention the more mundane purchase of equipment or funding
of travel expenses.
At PhD-student-level you may not be directly involved in submitting research grants, but you may be a component of one (either individually, or based on your research agenda), and it’s certainly never too early to grasp their significance. You certainly will have the opportunity at post-doc level.
But the lessons here are deeper too – the same approach is transferable to our PhD journey and to our justification of it. At the end of the day, our research, at whatever scale, has value, makes a contribution, and it’s important for us as researchers to not only be aware of this, but to effectively communicate this to stakeholders.
Each grant application or proposal will be different. That’s subject to the university, the government department, and/or the funder. Working through requirements is an exercise in extreme patience and pedanticism itself; with the value of the stakes, the payoff, both for your research career and position, is well worth it. Red tape and forms to fill, questions to answer, CV’s to copy and collate, research proposals to tweak to align with stakeholders interests.
So the big question that comes to the fore is – how to show your projects worth? Not in financial terms, but in contribution terms! After all, research is about creating value and making contribution – so, how are you going about this?
Canadian Academic Editor Dr Letitia Henville broke this very issue down for those of us in the social sciences and humanities in her very recent post to University Affairs. Answering a fellow academics question, her perspective takes broad brush strokes to the issue at hand to identify and expand core ideas and concepts. Warning; it does have a Canadian context, but this in itself shows no real difference to other geographies – the principles and how we embrace them remain a strong parallel.
How to Show your Project’s Worth in Social Science and Humanities Research Proposals
There are several different ways to define the “significance” of your research in a SSHRC application.
Question
When I
write CIHR grant applications, it’s easy for me to argue that my project is
important: it’s because of the impact my work will have on the health of
Canadians. But when I write SSHRC grant applications, I can’t make that same
argument, because the reviewers would think I’ve applied to the wrong funding
agency. How do I argue to SSHRC review committees that my work is worth
funding?
(Anonymous, Kinesiology)
Dr Editor’s Response
The Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada – while specifying different criteria for
different competitions – is generally looking to fund projects that are
significant, important, and valuable.
In SSHRC’s Insight Grant
competition, for instance, their evaluation criteria are “challenge,”
“feasibility,” and “capability”. As part of the “challenge” criterion, they’re
considering the “originality, significance,
and expected contribution to knowledge” of the project; under the “capability”
criterion, they’re considering the “quality, quantity and significance of
past experience and published and/or creative outputs”. Other SSHRC
competitions want to know about your top five “most significant career
research contributions”.
The term “significance”
isn’t defined in SSHRC’s glossary, but from the contexts
above, one has the sense that “significance” might mean something like
“importance” or “value.” Yet that reference to “quality […] and significance”
of past publications does contain an additional connotation. “Significance” is
something other than “quality”, so suggests influence, prestige, or that
equally undefined term, “impact.”
You might argue, for
instance, that your monograph was “significant” because it won important awards
or was published by a high-prestige university press, while your journal
article might accrue significance through its inclusion in a journal with a
high impact factor. By seeming to have passed the most rigorous standards of
peer review, you could argue
that your research is “significant” without even referring to the quality of
its content. But would you want to?
Ideally, your work will be important, not merely prestigious. I spoke with current and former chairs of Insight and Insight Development selection committees to learn more about the ways that researchers can demonstrate the significance of their work in SSHRC funding applications.
Intellectual Significance
“Virtually every proposed SSHRC
project will make some kind of contribution,” says Penelope
Farfan, Professor at the University of Calgary School of Creative and
Performing Arts and former Chair of the Insight Development Grant selection
committee for fine arts and research-creation. “But the applicant must also
make clear why that contribution matters: what is at stake in the proposed
research, why is it important, why should we care?”
One way to answer these
questions is by showing that your project will reshape conversations in your
field. Igor Grossmann, Associate Professor of Psychology at the
University of Waterloo, and former chair of the Insight Grant peer review
committee for psychology, points to the theoretical or methodological
contributions a project could make as attesting to its significance: “Does the
research break new ground? Does it address a meaningful gap in the literature
or introduce a systematic way to approach a complex topic? Does it provide a
useful methodological tool that can help the scientific community to move
forward?” Articulate an answer to one or more of these questions, and you’ll be
attesting to the intellectual significance of your work.
You might be able to speak to the intellectual significance of your previous work through conventional means – h-index, journal impact factor, citations, awards – but you might also devise new metrics to attest to the significance of your contributions to your field. You might:
- Show that X number of the Y universities in Canada that include your department keep your most recent book in the course reserves section.
- Compare your number of Twitter followers to others at your rank in your field (are you the most popular social media user in your field in Canada?); or,
- Tally the number of minutes of airtime you received on TV, radio, YouTube channels or podcasts over the past year, or the number of hours you’ve spent being interviewed by people in the media.
The significance of your
contributions to academic and broader social discourse is only one way you can
show that your work is important, though. “Significance can refer to the
applied or practical use of insights from the research, to address pressing
societal issues,” says Dr Grossmann, which brings us to our second type of
significance: social significance.
Social Significance
The social significance of
your work attests to its ability to serve the public good — or the good of a
specific population. Hagwil Hayetsk (Charles Menzies), Professor
of Anthropology at UBC and the chair of the 2019 SSHRC Insight Development
Grant committee on Indigenous Research, describes “significance” as a project’s
ability to serve the needs of people who aren’t academics:
“I am interested in the relationship between research, researcher,
and community where the research is to be conducted […]—in how this project is
relevant for those who are collaborating and assisting in the research through
permitting research to be conducted in their community. Some evaluators will be
interested in significance as a driver for ‘innovation’ within the field of
research, [but] I am less impressed by that and more concerned about whether
there are real and material benefits and important implications for the
communities who are part of the research project.”
The kind of significance
that Dr Menzies describes is increasingly expected in research conducted among
and about all kinds of communities. Such a focus on social significance doesn’t
necessarily mean that all SSH research must be utilitarian or applied — but
when your work is focused on an equity-deserving group, it seems to make sense
to seek to improve access and advance on the path of equity.
The social significance of
your work might be measured in changes in survey responses, interview or focus
group feedback, or quality of life measures, or you might name the policy,
program, or practice that you seek to inform or revise.
Peter Trnka, Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Memorial University and former Chair of the Insight Grant committee for Philosophy,
Medieval Studies, Classics, and Religious Studies, notes that the social
significance of your contributions needn’t be to human society: “Work in the
humanities and social sciences is often misconceived as having only to do with
humans and social systems, but some of us in philosophy, politics, economics,
etc., work on issues having to do with planetary and ecological and
environmental wellbeing.” Articulate the way you wish to shape or inform these
issues, and you’ll speak to the significance of your work.
Cultural Significance
If your work is in the
areas of cultural revitalization, sustainability, or production, you might
attest to the cultural significance of your work by articulating your
originality and influence. Were you the first of many to hybridize or open up a
particular form or genre? The first to stage a particular production? Have you
increased the number of people able to participate in a certain artistic,
musical, linguistic, or other creative activity? If so, you should describe the
cultural significance of your work.
Even if it is small or
specialized, your work can still have significant implications — especially if
it is in conversation with a broad, important cultural concern, like the
representation of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, emotion, reason,
capital, the nation-state, or a historical or artistic movement.
Economic Significance
None of the committee
chairs I spoke to said that they wanted to read about the monetary value of
research outputs. In your CIHR application, you might speak to both the needs
of a vulnerable population and the potential dollars saved by a particular
intervention. For SSHRC funding, however, peer reviewers seemed less invested
in an articulation of monetary return on investment. Of course, this may be a
reflection of the disciplines of the people with whom I spoke. If you’re
applying to SSHRC for the first time, request the input of readers in the
discipline of your selection committee before you submit, as understandings of
significance are context- and discipline-specific.
Nonetheless, if you work
has an impact on the bottom line of some system — education, the arts, even
healthcare — it seems worth mentioning, as long as you do so in conversation
with at least one of the other forms of significance described above. The
economic significance of your research could be measured in the number or
quality of jobs created, revenue generated, products sold, or spin-off
companies created.
In sum: “significance” is
a broad term, and stating that your work is generally important seems
insufficient. If you can articulate one or more categories in which you seek to
make a significant contribution or change, you’ll be more likely to persuade
your reviewers that your work is worth funding.
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