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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Evidence for Action: Investigator-Initiated Research to Build a Culture of Health (Rolling)

Introduction & Purpose

Evidence for Action (E4A), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), funds research that expands the evidence needed to build a Culture of Health. A Culture of Health is broadly defined as one in which good health and well-being flourish across geographic, demographic, and social sectors; public and private decision-making is guided by the goal of fostering equitable communities; and everyone has the opportunity to make choices that lead to healthy lifestyles. RWJF’s Culture of Health Action Framework, which was developed to catalyze a national movement toward improved health, well-being, and equity, guides E4A’s program strategy.

Eligibility & Selection Criteria

Preference will be given to applicants that are either institutes of higher education, public entities, or nonprofit organizations that are tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and are not private foundations or Type III supporting organizations. Other types of nonprofit and for-profit organizations are also eligible to apply. The Foundation may require additional documentation. Applicant organizations must be based in the United States or its territories. Submissions from teams that include both U.S. and international members are eligible, but the lead applicant must be based in the United States.

Key Dates & Deadlines

Applicant Webinar
We hosted an applicant webinar on April 12, 2019.

During the webinar, we:

  • Reviewed our updated Call for Proposals and the different phases in the application process;
  • Discussed what it means to be an E4A grantee;
  • Hosted a live Q&A period with participants.

A recording is available here.

Since applications are accepted on a rolling basis, there is no deadline for submission. Generally, applicants can expect to be notified within 6-9 weeks of their LOI submission. Applicants invited to the full proposal stage will have 2 months to submit their proposal once they receive notification. Full proposal funding decisions will generally be made within 6-9 weeks of the submission deadline.

Total Awards

There is not an explicit range for allowable budget requests. You should request the amount of funding you will need to complete your proposed research project – including both direct and indirect costs for the entire duration of your study. Typical grant durations may be up to 36 months, with some exceptions when durations of up to 48 months are justified. Visit the Grantee section of our website for a sense of the number and size of grants funded by E4A at http://www.evidenceforaction.org/grantees.

Share Your Story: Federal Grant Terminations and Data Restrictions

The Population Association of America (PAA) has updated the form used to collect details, on an ongoing basis, from members who have been adversely affected by actions taken by the Administration, including federal grant terminations and data restrictions. The revised form provides guidance and encourages individuals to share their stories, which will be featured in a regular newsletter designed to educate policymakers and the public about the consequences of these federal actions.

Please feel free to share this form with your colleagues. If you have questions, please contact Mary Jo Mitchell, PAA/APC Government Affairs Director.

 

Survey on Federal Data Use and Repositories

Recently, the Office of Research sponsored a panel and discussion on the challenges surrounding the loss of data, including data that is removed from publicly available sites, national surveys that are canceled, and standard survey measures or data changed for non-scientific reasons. In addition, the UW Libraries has been actively engaged in helping researchers find and preserve data. This survey, created jointly by the UW Faculty Council on Research (FCR), the UW Libraries, and the Office of Research, seeks to learn more about your research needs in this domain of concerns and challenges. FCR, the Office of Research, and the UW Libraries will summarize the results from this survey over the summer and present to the Faculty Senate in AUT 2025. We will use the survey results to inform efforts to safeguard data needed for research and to educate the UW community on alternative locations for accessing and securely storing data.

Data Access With Federal Administration’s Transition

The challenges of data access during federal administrative transitions can happen every four years. What follows are some resources that might be useful. We will continue to update this blog post with new information. If you have any links that could be helpful, please send csde@uw.edu your updated and helpful information. We know that what follows may not provide you with the exact data you need, so let us know what you need and what’s missing and we can try to find where it is located. If you have data that needs hosting, we can also provide you with suggestions for where to do so at UW.

Every four years an endeavor takes place to refresh the End of Term Web Archive. It’s a coordinated project to archive parts of the federal web before the end of a presidential term. See this website. It is currently processing 300 TB of the last administration’s public administration files.  Another place to look is the Way Back Machine.  The Data Rescue 2025 Github site is one place to learn about what has been rescued and how to rescue data.

The UW libraries is maintaining a Library Guide about Federal Data Access. You can find that page here. They also have freely available government datasets ingested into UW Libraries-licensed databases like Sage Data, Simply Analytics, and others with lock icons next to them here. The libraries team of federal data librarians can be contacted at that site, if you have questions about what is available.

One place to check for some available demographic data are the resources at the University of Minnesota.  Additionally, the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan provides DataLumos (https://www.datalumos.org/datalumos/) which is a crowd-sourced and open-source resource for government data archiving.  There is also the Public Environmental Data project that will soon have about 52 massive datasets coming online. You might also check data repositories like the UW Dryad collection for environmental science data and publications.

There are third party sites, as well, such as

  1. the Registry of Research Data Repositories https://www.re3data.org,
  2. Data Commons (owned by Google),
  3. Proton
  4. Policy Map (https://www.policymap.com/) (they also have provided a recent link to rescued data on their site: https://policymap.wpengine.com/blog/purged-federal-agency-data-available),
  5. the St. Louis Fed (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/),
  6. Census Reporter (https://censusreporter.org/),
  7. ESRI (https://www.esri.com/en-us/home) which, e.g., provides mapped ACS data (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/esri-demographics/latest/regional-data/acs.htm).
  8. Flourish and Thrive Labs has archived CDC data here. For now, they are providing these data free of charge to state and local public health agencies, contact: cdcdatarequest@fandtlabs.com and provide the following information in your email: name, 1️⃣ Your Name, 2️⃣ The name of the health department where you work, 3️⃣ What dataset you need and for what date ranges. If you don’t know the name of the dataset, describe what you are trying to do.
  9. BryanGeoDemo offers access to many recent public health and demographic data.

There are also tools for archiving data.  Here are some links for you:

For keeping up-to-date on data and for finding additional resources:

  • Check out the Federal Register for updates on legislation and policy changes.
  • The Federal Data Forum is a place to share messages, materials, and announcements related to the U.S. federal statistical system and federal data products.
  • America’s Data Index monitors America’s federal data infrastructure from dataset availability and new releases to planned and unplanned changes to collections.
  • Social Science Space brings social scientists together to explore, share and shape the big issues in social science, from funding to impact. This online social network features blogs with the most current thinking from key players in social science, a forum for discussions, a resource center with free videos, reports and slides that support these discussions, as well as funding and job opportunity notices.
  • Wanting to preserve data? Find data? Gather new data?  Send an email to csde_help@uw.edu or email CSDE’s favorite UW Library partner Kian Flynn (flynnk7@uw.edu) . Both are places where you might be able to find support for locating, pulling, scraping, and retaining data.
  • The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) is a nonprofit advocacy organization working to promote and advance the social and behavioral sciences in federal policymaking, which posts lots of content relevant to our work as researchers in the current moment.  Check out their Washington Update for the latest information on research-related policy change and activities.

 

Keeping Up With UW-Relevant Federal Policy Updates and Federal Administration Research Policy

The research community is facing a period of rapid change and uncertainty in the federal funding landscape. The university is closely monitoring changes and their potential impacts to the UW research enterprise. Information on the Office of Research’s Guidance on Federal Administration Research Policy page is updated frequently. If you are a researcher and interested in receiving updates, please subscribe to PI Federal communications (you’ll need UWNETID). The Provost’s office is also maintaining a site for all Federal Policy Updates.

Opportunities to Publish Research Policy Briefs with the Association of Population Centers

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers, and through them can offer you or your colleagues the opportunity to have new or forthcoming research that you want to share with policymakers, journalists, educators, or other non-academic audiences. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB), in collaboration with APC, is working to improve the dissemination of population and reproductive health findings. If you have peer-reviewed research on population dynamics, population health, or reproductive health that you would like to share with a broader audience in an easily digestible format, APC and PRB may be able to help.  To learn how, visit their website and take a look at recent research policy briefs.

Preprint Opportunities through Association of Population Centers

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers and through them can offer you and your colleagues access to their preprint publishing platform. Research Scientists, Postdoctoral affiliates and faculty are invited to submit to the APCA Working Paper Series which gathers and disseminates original population science research papers. These working papers are authored or coauthored by scholars who are faculty or postdoctoral affiliates of the Association of Population Centers (APC) population centers. Working papers can also be authored by ABD student affiliates of APC population centers (CSDE Trainees that are ABD); faculty affiliates must submit the papers on student affiliates’ behalf. Papers in the series include works in progress and pre-publication versions of articles. Many of these papers will be subsequently published in journals or edited volumes.