To: Members of NBER program on Health Economics
NIH has issued an R24 funding opportunity for resource-related
research projects on basic social and behavioral research on culture,
health, and wellbeing. They are two-year grants, with $125 to
$150,000 per year for direct costs. Proposals would be due on
December 17, with a non-binding letter of intent on November
16th. A brief description and link to the full announcement are below.
Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in this
competition, or in learning more about NIH proposals and grants
generally. We look forward to working with you!
Janet
Basic social and behavioral research on culture, health, and wellbeing (R24)
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-LM-12-002.html
This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), issued on behalf of the
NIH Basic Behavioral and Social Sciences Opportunity Network
(OppNet), will provide grants for infrastructure support to develop,
strengthen, and evaluate transdisciplinary approaches and methods for
basic behavioral and/or social research on the relationships among
cultural practices/beliefs, health, and wellbeing. This includes an
appreciation for more comprehensive understandings of the
relationships regarding cultural attitudes, beliefs, practices, and
processes, on outcomes relevant to human health and wellbeing. Model
animal research teams are welcome to apply.
Background
Culture usually is defined in terms of beliefs and practices that are
shared within a population, which itself may share attributes such as
ethnicity, race, language, gender, sexuality, specific physical
impairments or geographic space. These beliefs and practices reflect
common values, socialization processes that are intrinsic to the
population of interest, and their other shared attributes. In
practice, investigators may use gross distinctions such as
demographic categories or political boundaries as proxies for
culture, with little attention to how well these categories capture
actual shared culture. The specific processes by which culture
encompasses beliefs and practices related to health may be obscured
by surrogate variables to designate culture (e.g., language, national
origin, race/ethnicity). There is a need for research that improves
the conceptualization and measurement of culture and does this in the
context of health and social and behavioral processes that influence health.
Basic research on the relations among cultural processes, attitudes,
health behaviors, and outcomes can lead to more precise measurement
on social-behavioral mechanisms of culture and can provide reliable
and valid grounding for measures across future disease-specific
and/or target-population-specific investigations.
The R24 mechanism is designed to build research infrastructure and
incorporates research projects as part of this effort. Projects
should bring together transdiciplinary teams of investigators who
can, collectively, provide new insights into the relationaships
between aspects of culture and health. The team should choose a small
project that demonstrates the power of their approach to deliver new
insights that lead to improved health outcomes or facilitates the
effectiveness of health research. This project may provide formative
or pilot data which can be used to inform future, larger
transdisciplinary health research.
Janet Stein
Program Administrator
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
phone: (617) 588-0366
fax: (617) 868-2742
Received on Tue Oct 09 2012 - 09:34:57 EDT
