Professor Pamela Oliver Department of Sociology

Submitting a grant proposal

L&S "research" page and Research & Sponsored Programs have a lot of information needed. Take time to explore these sites to be aware of what information is there.

It is important to know that you can get going on administrative details for grant proposals before you have finished the narrative. While you are still planning your project, take the time to figure out what administrative things you'll need to do and when to do them. In particular, when last I heard, NSF was still using Fastlane, which requires getting an account set up in advance. Instructions in the L&S Research Services page tell you have.

These procedures keep changing so watch for updates. L&S Research Services has the latest guidelines. Within Sociology, the Social Science Research Services administration can help with grants preparation.

Don't forget to determine EARLY whether your project needs Human Subjects clearance. Details are on the L&S Human Subjects Page.

General tips in proposal writing:

1. It should be clear within the first few paragraphs what you are going to DO in the research. Set the agenda before launching into the theory, background, lit review.
2. Write to a general audience of sociologists or social scientists, not the people in your sub-specialty.You have to explain to an intelligent non-specialist audience why your work is interesting and important. The decision-makers at NSF are the panel, not the external reviewers, although the external reviews from specialists are certainly given serious consideration.
3. The proposal needs to be self-contained. Reviewers have a lot to read and are not going to go to the library to look up your other work.
4. The typical proposal has too much front end (lit review, theory & background) and too little method. Concrete details about what you are going to DO are really important. Even if this is an early phase, you can make your best guesses about what you are going to do and write it in clear declarative sentences.
5. Write with an eye to sounding like you understand core principles of research design. Non-specialists are not necessarily going to understand why your research is interesting within your research tradition, but they are going to feel perfectly competent to critique your research methods. If you are a qualitative researcher, think about how to explain the logic of your research to a quantitative researcher. And vice versa: if you crunch secondary data, think about how to explain to a qualitative researcher the logic of what you are doing. In addition, you need to sound methodologically competent and informed to reviewers who ARE experts in what you do.
6. Some preliminary data, even VERY preliminary and very partial data, makes a big difference in a proposal. It makes the whole thing seem very real and concrete. One table, a page of narrative about preliminary qualitative findings, whatever. A traditional method is to write the proposal about the work you have already done as a way of getting funding for your next project, but the narrative cannot just describe your past work, you have to describe what you are asking for money to do in the future.

    

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Questions or Comments? Email Oliver -at- ssc -dot- wisc -dot- edu. Last updated September 24, 2007 © University of Wisconsin.