Standard Research Grant Writing Seminar

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Standard Research Grant Writing Seminar

• Nouhad Hammad
• September 2006

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Grant Writing Seminar

• What is new at SSHRC
• Appointment of a new president.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Objectives of the Standard Research Grants
• Program
• Peer-reviewed independent programs of research
• Training of future researchers
• New theoretical or methodological approaches
• Disciplinary and multidisciplinary research
• Communication of research results

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Characteristics
• Three-year cycle
• Team and individual applications
• Funding of a program of research
• 100,000 per year or 250,000 over 3 years
• March 2006 Success rate was 40.4 with an
  average three-year grant awarded of 83,500.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Eligibility
• Affiliation with a Canadian post-secondary
  institution
• Submission of the Final Research Report
• Not a student Ph.D. rule
• Citizenship not an issue anymore.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• NEW SCHOLAR CATEGORY
• Has not been awarded, as a principal
  investigator, an SRG, MCRI or a Strategic Grant
• Completed highest degree less than five years OR
• Held tenure-track position less than 5 years OR
• Never had a tenure-track position OR
• Career interrupted or delayed for family reasons
• Score weighting

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Grant Writing Seminar

• NEW ADJUDICATION COMMITTEES (23)
• 23 committees
• 2 new adjudication Committees and five modified
• Committee 27 New Psychology 2 Counseling,
  developmental, human assessment and
  psychometrics, psychotherapy, industrial/organizat
  ional, sports and health.
• Committee 10 -Psychology 1 Social, personality
  and individual differences behavioural,
  community and environmental cultural
• Committee 28 New Education 3 Counseling and
  career guidance, early childhood education,
  educational psychology, health sciences
  education, health promotion and disease
  prevention, measurement and evaluation, physical
  education, special education, teaching methods,
  pedagogy

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Grant Writing Seminar

• ADJUDICATION COMMITTEES
• Committee 12 (Education 1) Arts education,
  bilingual education, second language education,
  civic and environmental education, curriculum,
  geography and history education, moral, values
  and religious education, reading and writing,
  science and math education, teacher education
• Committee 17 (Education 2)Library and
  information science, archival science, adult,
  continuing and community education, comparative
  education, computer assisted instruction,
  distance education, educational administration,
  educational technology (media), higher education,
  history, philosophy and theory of education,
  sociology of education, vocational education

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Grant Writing Seminar

• ADJUDICATION COMMITTEES
• Special attention to Committees 21 (Management)
  and 22 (Finance and Accounting)
• Some sub-disciplines were moved from one to
  another.
• Committee 21 Human resources management,
  international business, management marketing,
  organizational studies, business policy,
  industrial relations
• Committee 22 Accounting, finance,  management of
  information systems, management science,
  productions and operations management

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Choosing committee members
• Overall competence and credibility
• Scholarly stature of the individual nominees
• Appropriate representation on the basis of
• areas of expertise
• small/mid-size/large university
• geographical region
• language
• gender

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Choosing external assessors
• Two assessors chosen per file
• Conflict of interest
• a close friend
• a relative
• a research collaborator
• a departmental colleague
• a student previously under the applicants
  supervision
• a person with whom the applicant is involved in a
  dispute
• a person with whom the applicant is involved in a
  partnership

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Grant Writing Seminar

• EVALUATION CRITERIA (Record of Research)
• over the last 6 years unless career interruption
• Quality and significance of published work
• Originality and impact of previous research
• Quantity of research activity
• Importance of other scholarly activities
• Recentness of output
• Relevance of dissemination to non-academics
• Productivity from previous grant(s)
• Training of future researchers

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Grant Writing Seminar

• EVALUATION CRITERIA (Program of Research)
• Originality and contribution to advancement of
  knowledge
• Intellectual, social and cultural significance of
  research
• Appropriateness of the theoretical
  approaches/framework
• Appropriateness of the research
  strategies/methodologies
• Good literature review
• Suitability of plans to communicate research
  results
• The nature and extent of research training

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Preparation
• Do not submit a premature proposal.
• Invest time in the preparation of your proposal.
• Ensure that there are no errors
• Present a well-written and carefully crafted
  proposal.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Overall presentation
• Convey and inspire confidence
• Present a challenging topic
• Establish clearly the need for the research.
• Demonstrate its importance and originality.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Overall presentation (continued)
• Prepare your proposal with the assessors and
  committee in mind.
• Strike a balance between ambition and realism.
• Demonstrate how this new research builds upon
  past work.
• Have your grant proposal read by colleagues who
  have been successful in the SRG competition
• Follow the application and CV instructions

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Summary Page
• Clearly indicate the purpose, the objectives, the
  context and impact.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Statement of objectives and theoretical
• framework
• Clear and precise objectives.
• Clear theoretical or conceptual framework.
• Define all key terms or concepts.
• Complete literature review.
• Append a list of all references cited.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Methodology
• Explain and justify methodology.
• Synergy between objectives and methodology.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Presenting your curriculum vitae
• 60 of the score to the Record of Research
• Follow the instructions.
• Organize your publications.
• Avoid inflating the c.v.
• Demonstrate productivity from previous grants.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES/
• CAREER INTERRUPTIONS
• LEGITIMATE EXCUSES
• Serious health problems, death of a loved one,
  ageing parents, and leaves (child birth,
  parental, adoption leave)
• NOT LEGITIMATE EXCUSES
• Heavy teaching load, having to sit on committees,
  having to move, having to write a book, buying a
  car

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Budget
• Reasonable and fully justified budget.
• Check list of eligible and ineligible expenses.
• Explain the role of students.
• Link between research objectives and budget.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Team applications
• Applicant should demonstrate the value of team
  application
• Each member is assessed
• MYTH SSHRC favors team applications.
• TRUTH only 39 of applications are from teams

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Grant Writing Seminar

• Things to Keep in Mind!
• Do not be discouraged by a previously
  unsuccessful application.
• In 2006, success rate was 40.4. Another 39
  were recommended but not funded.

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Grant Writing Seminar

• COMMITTEE COMMENTS THE TOP 4
• Incomplete or outdated literature review
• Lack of theoretical rationale
• Lack of specificity and justification in the
  methodology
• No link between the conceptual framework and the
  methodology

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Grant Writing Seminar

• PEER REVIEW PROCESS
• Peer review fatigue
• Becoming more difficult to recruit committee
  members
• And more difficult to find external assessors
• Streamlining the adjudication meetings Pilot
  Project
• 2006 All but 4 committees were pilot committees
• Top 15, bottom 35, no committee comments
• Flagging system
• Teleconference and benchmark files
• ranking

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Grant Writing Seminar

• WAYS TO ENSURE YOU WILL ANNOY THE
• COMMITTEE
• Write in a really small font and rely exclusively
  on your spellchecker
• Avoid paragraph breaks and headings
• Reduce the space between lines
• Reduce the margins
• Do all the above and whine that you do not have
  enough space to explain your methodology
• Use as many acronyms as you can but then change
  their spelling part way through the application

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Grant Writing Seminar

• MORE WAYS TO ENSURE YOU WILL ANNOY THE
• COMMITTEE
• Justify your application to interdisciplinary
  studies on the basis that your colleagues in your
  discipline are hopelessly out of date
• Keep submitting the same application without
  taking any notice of previous committees
  comments
• Identify the leading figure in the field as an
  idiot
• Tell the committee all kinds of things about
  yourself which were not requested and which are
  not relevant to the application

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Grant Writing Seminar

• BE ANNOYING IN YOUR RESEARCH RECORD
• Double-count publications in your CV
• Avoid paragraph breaks
• Mix up your refereed publications
• Include articles that are more than six years old
• Invent your own method of referencing
• Do not include page s
• Do not indicate what was produced from a past
  SSHRC grant

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Grant Writing Seminar

• MORE WAYS TO ENSURE YOU ARE ANNOYING
• Claim that nobody has ever done anything vaguely
  related to your topic before
• Insist that you are waiting for the science to
  catch up with you
• Insist that you have nothing to learn from recent
  scholarship
• Insist that there is a conspiracy out there
  trying to get you (Marxist, feminist, right-wing,
  etc.)
• Critique last years committee members
• Get together a team of three researchers and
  submit basically the same proposal three times
  (to the same committee)

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Grant Writing Seminar

• STILL MORE
• Assume you are so prominent you can get by on
  your record and dont bother much about the
  program of research (the trust me application)
• Include a prominent researcher as a Co-applicant
  but do not give him/her a clearly defined role
• Do not indicate productivity from past grant(s)

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Grant Writing Seminar

• BE ANNOYING IN YOUR BUDGET
• Add up your budget incorrectly
• Say you need a full time research director
• Ask for an 8,000 notebook when all you need is a
  simple word processor
• Plan to attend many conferences and fly business
  class
• Do not give students definite and meaningful
  tasks
• Use lots of non-student personnel
• Put office furniture in your budget

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Grant Writing Seminar

• How to stay informed and involved?
• Visit the web site for regular updates.
• www.sshrc.ca
• Contact your Program Officer
• http//www.sshrc.ca/web/apply/background/standard
  _officers_e.asp

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Grant Writing Seminar

• References
• Merriam, S. B. (2002). Introduction to
  qualitative research. In S. Merriam Associates
  (Eds.), Qualitative research in practice (pp.
  4-17). San Francisco John Wiley and Sons.
•  
• Maxwell, J.A. (2005). Qualitative research
  design An interactive approach (2nd ed.). U.S.A
  Sage Publications.