Federal funding of social work research: high hopes or sour grapes?

Corvo, Kenneth ; Chen, Wan-Yi ; Selmi, Patrick 等

In 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a petition formally making [the] charge that the Bush White House puts political ideology over science when writing policy or when determining who sits on advisory panels set up to provide expert input into decision making. It has now been signed by more than 8,000 scientists, including 49 Nobel laureates and 63 National Medal of Science recipients.

--Don Gonyea, "Bush Science Push Fails to Transform Critics"

Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.

--Richard Nixon, taped Oval Office conversation with Henry Kissinger

The relationship between federal funding and academic research has often been contentious. With the expansion of federal funding to academic researchers following World War II, some critics accused the relationship of corrupting research and contributing to what in the 1960s came to be referred to as the "military-industrial complex." (Recent usage of this term can be traced to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's, 1961, farewell address to the nation upon leaving office. In an earlier draft of the address, Eisenhower used the term "military-industrial-congressional complex," but he struck out the word "congressional" to avoid offending members of the legislative branch.) Some of the political issues in contemporary federal funding of academic research can be traced to what occurred in the transition from wartime to peacetime investments in science following World War II. In a National Science Foundation (NSF) article titled "Inventing US Science Policy" (Blanpied, n.d.), William Carey was quoted describing the period as follows:

   You have to think of the atmosphere. This was
   postwar, most of the world in ashes, the US riding
   very, very high, dreaming great dreams--the
   Full Employment Act, the United Nations, the
   Marshall Plan. And then, along in parallel, there
   was to be a new age of science and creativity.
   ... We were building a brave new world and all
   would go well. There was a very short window
   of idealism and optimism that closed very
   abruptly [with the advent of the cold war].

Federal investments in academic research, then, were rapidly redirected from scientific curiosity per se and increasingly harnessed as instrumental in combating perceived military threats and scientific competition from the Soviet Union and the global spread of communism. Beginning in the 1960s with the addition of federal funding for research associated with the War on Poverty, federal funding has served as an avenue of support for faculty performing social and behavioral research--albeit at lower levels than typically provided in the hard sciences and going to a relatively select group of schools and researchers.

Schools of social work have been late to realize the importance of research vis-a-vis teaching and service (National Association of Deans and Directors of Schools of Social Work Task Force on Administrative Research Infrastructures within Social Work Education Programs, 1997). Until approximately the early 1990s, much of social work research was conducted without federal support through the auspices of university funding and external nonprofit granting organizations. However, with the ascent of neoliberal university policies (see Canaan & Shumar, 2008, for discussion)--including declining support for public programs and increasing desire to connect universities to business and serve as engines of economic development--public funding at the state level has declined, and one response by many universities has been to "encourage" faculty to pursue federal funding, which comes with generous indirect costs that departments and universities can use to underwrite their programs (or, in other words, to offset declining state support). These arrangements are affecting private universities as well, as the need for expansion of buildings and enrollments combined with increasing competition for private donations has created financial dilemmas on many campuses, only exacerbated by the recent economic recession and the loss of billions of dollars from university endowments. In social work, these conditions have contributed to and been aided by the trend toward social work programs becoming more aligned with the health sciences rather than the humanities and by the expansion of doctoral programs. The new relationships created have spawned some important and interesting research and program collaborations, but they have also aligned social work with institutional environments rooted in federal funding for research. Indeed, it is now common to see preconference workshops at national social work conferences led by staff at federal research institutes providing pointers on how to be a successful applicant. What we often see now, in fact, is the replacement of evaluation of faculty candidates on the basis of publications with assessments of their ability to seek and receive external funding.

Although federal funding may provide important support for academic research, we need to be wary of it becoming the "standard" for success in academia and beyond. We need to do so for several reasons:

* Setting federal funding as a key benchmark or evaluative criterion of faculty research serves to narrow rather than widen the scope of social work research activities.

* Federal research funding is largely determined by the priorities set by presidential administrations. Given the changing nature of political administrations and their priorities and fact that social work not only addresses complex social problems but often socially and politically controversial ones, we need to raise questions and be careful about the potential for academic social work research to become dependent on funding sources that may not be congruent with the priorities of the profession.

* The encouragement of federal research projects serves in many respects as a threat to faculty autonomy and academic freedom. It does this in a number of ways, including discouraging new faculty from pursuing their ideas freely but, instead, doing so within the scope of what will receive federal support and discouraging doctoral students from pursuing certain lines of research because it will be difficult to secure funding for that research.

* The trend toward federally supported research threatens to turn research into an avenue of departmental fundraising. The faculty research-as-department-fundraising model is problematic on the grounds it may lead to confusion of values, goals, and objectives and, in the process, serve as a corrupting force in research.

* Social work academics, overall, are not well positioned to successfully obtain federal funding on a large-scale basis, and, indeed, one might argue that moving in mass toward viewing federally funded research as a standard benchmark is irrational (Corvo, Zlotnik, & Chen, 2008).

In this article, we pay special attention to the irrational and unintended dimensions in the pursuit of federal funding and also incorporate a discussion of the normative issues involved. The analysis is placed in the general structural framework of ecological theory, in which the interplay between organizational processes and larger political and institutional forces has implications for the structure and operations of organizations. We also examine some of these issues within the general framework of analysis provided by the sociology of knowledge.

GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE

Within the overall historical framework of governmental funding of science is the subset of related processes and relationships that pertain specifically to the funding of behavioral or social science, within which the funding of social work research is nested. Crowther-Heyck (2006) has examined in detail the effects of postwar federal funding on behavioral science, both in content of what is studied and as regards the structural impacts on the boundaries of academic disciplines. Using the term "patronage" in preference to "funding," Crowther-Heyck described the dramatic and far-reaching effects of federal funding of behavioral science. Among them were the following: increased scale and specialization--research done by teams using scarce, expensive resources like expensive equipment and data archives; the acceptance of a biomedical model of methods and goals at the expense of a social engineering model; and the concentration of resources in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NSF leading to a centralization of decision making. Crowther-Heyck concluded,

   [Patronage] can provide differential support
   for (or against) different philosophical stances,
   methodological approaches, research topics, ...
   social values, concepts, theories....; as well as
   providing differential support for (or against)
   groups defined by social criteria such as race,
   gender, geographic location, or class. (p. 444)

What looks like a set of pragmatic, tactical accommodations and relationships between academe and the federal government when viewed in the short run (for example, responding to a request for proposal) appears quite different when viewed through a longer, wider historical lens.

Funders have interests. Funders have agendas. Whether it is the patronage of the Medicis, the deliberate distortions of the Tobacco Institute, the program priorities of a foundation, or the policy goals of a federal agency, few funders give carte blanche to researchers to create or seek knowledge. Sometimes grant seekers are fortunate enough to find funders whose interests and agendas are already in agreement with theirs. It is not uncommon, however, for grant seekers to find that they must modify their methodology or even topics of interest to secure funding. What are the implications of government funding of research and grant seeking for schools of social work and academic social work researchers?

SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH

The Institute for the Advancement of Social Work Research (IASWR) (2003) described social work research as follows:

   Social work research addresses psychosocial
   problems, preventive interventions, treatment of
   acute and chronic conditions, and community,
   organizational, policy and administrative issues.
   Covering the lifespan, social work research may
   address clinical, services and policy issues. It
   benefits consumers, practitioners, policymakers,
   educators, and the general public.

Historically, social work has had a dual emphasis on direct service and social reform (Corvo, Selmi, & Montemaro, 2003), which may sometimes place the profession in a critical or confrontational stance with governmental or other formal institutions. The conflicts between social work and some federal administrations have been bitter: Richard Nixon "hated social workers" and famously asked if certain federal policies would "get rid of social workers" (Reeves, 2001, p. 100).

How does this dual mission differ from that of other human service professions? In addition to promoting efforts to ameliorate suffering and promote the growth of individuals and families, social work's Code of Ethics (NASW, 2008) explicitly challenges institutional power and inequalities (that is, social injustice and oppression) that can maintain suffering or interfere with growth and potential. This is not a secondary, optional role for social work, like, for example, the lobbying efforts of other professions. Rather, it is an integral element of professional practice. The social reform and social change element of social work may directly conflict with the applicant postures necessary to secure governmental support for research.

In contrast with social work's historical mission of practice with marginalized and underrepresented populations, scientific orientations to practice and the prioritization of research is relatively recent (Holleran & Thompson, 2005). By comparison, active scientific foundations in the practice of professional psychology can be traced to the Boulder Conference in 1949, where the scientist-practitioner model was developed (Fraser, 2003).

Organizations like IASWR (http://www.iaswresearch.org) and the Society for Social Work and Research (http://www.sswr.org) have endeavored to advance and strengthen social work research. At the request of Congress, NIH (2003) developed a social work research plan outlining priorities and setting a research agenda for social work research across constituent NIH institutes and subunits. The intent of this plan was to encourage and support social work researchers in pursuing funding through NIH.

FEDERAL FUNDING OF SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH

Data on the federal funding of research is not publicly available in searchable, aggregate form across cabinet-level organizational boundaries. It is also not available in searchable formats within many funding agencies. NIH's CRISP database (http://crisp.cit. nih.gov) contains searchable data on grants made by NIH and its constituent units. Although it may be possible to identify grants made to social work researchers in other, non-NIH federal agencies (for example, the National Institute of Justice), the data are far less accessible. Much of the analysis that follows comes from data made available through NIH. This may create the appearance that NIH is being singled out in a critical light. To the contrary, NIH should be applauded for its efforts toward transparency in making information on funding readily available. Other funders, federal and otherwise, could do worse than to emulate NIH's online data availability and transparency.

NIH is the primary agency of the federal government in the areas of civilian biomedical and behavioral research and has the largest share of the federal budget in those areas (Smith, 2006). Although the relationships among funders and grant seekers and the implications of those relationships may vary, the importance and magnitude of NIH investment in research illustrates most powerfully those implications.

IASWR (2008) has used data from CRISP to report on the funding activities and successes of social work researchers. IASWR (2008) reported that in a 15-year period, from 1993 to 2007, NIH made 641 grants to social work researchers at 118 institutions, 83 of them colleges or universities. This averages out to about 43 grants per year. NIH institutes that made most (81 percent) of those grants were the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (306), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (167), and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (45). Again, this represents only funding from NIH and constituent agencies and no other federal, non-NIH funding.

In 1997, the National Association of Deans and Directors of Schools of Social Work Task Force on Administrative Research Infrastructures within Social Work Education Programs issued a report on federally funded research on social work, noting that social work researchers received less than one-half of 1 percent of all NIH research support. Although the number of NIH research grants received by social work researchers varies from year to year, IASWR (2008) reported that it declined from a peak of over 60 grants in 1998 to just over 20 in 2007. Some of this decline may be attributable to overall decreases since 2004 in NIH funding for all purposes except bioterrorism (Agres, 2007).

Corvo et al. (2008) examined organizational and institutional factors associated with NIH research grant awards to schools of social work from 1993 to 2005.They found that NIH grants to schools of social work were concentrated in only a handful of schools, with the top five schools (out of about 160 accredited MSW- and MSW/PhD-granting schools in 2005) receiving almost half of all grants and the top 13 receiving 75 percent. About two-thirds (100) of the schools received no NIH funding. If the basis of comparison is expanded to include all of the more than 400 U.S. social work departments (that is, those offering only BSW degrees), only about 1 percent of schools/departments received 50 percent of NIH grants. These calculations are solely based on distributions of NIH grants to social work schools and programs. The competition for NIH grants involves a much broader array of academic and nonacademic organizations (for example, medical schools, departments of psychology, research institutes).

The overall likelihood of receiving an NIH grant is another important factor in examining the implications of grant seeking. Success rates "indicate the percentage of reviewed Research Project Grant applications that receive funding" (NIH Office of Extramural Research, n.d.). Calculations of NIH success rates (the percentages of proposals funded versus those reviewed) vary according to funding mechanism (for example, R01 [research project] grants), where in the review process a proposal is considered to be "competing," whether the proposal is unsolicited or a resubmission, which institute is making the grants, and so forth. The NIH Office of Extramural Research (n.d.) provides data on annual success rates by institute and funding mechanism. They reported that in 2007, the overall NIH applicant success rate was 21 percent; the rate ranged from 7 percent to 32 percent by institute or agency. However, not all institutes are equally suitable for social work research (for example, compare the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and NIMH). New R01s (the basic research mechanism for NIH and the largest single grant type) were funded at 19 percent overall; continuation R01s (those funded in a previous year) were funded at 36 percent overall. Therefore, new R01 grant applications have about a 1:5 chance of being funded, and continuation grants have about a 1:3 chance. However, the NIH-reported calculations of success may not accurately reveal the actual probabilities of funding encountered by new applicants. Mandel and Vesell (2006) examined NIH success rates for 2005 and found that the actual success rates for unsolicited, unamended first submissions for R01 grants was only 9 percent--a 1:11 chance:

   The unamended R01 represents the original
   application and does not consider resubmissions.
   NIH classifies R01 applications into
   type-1 (new) and type-2 (renewals). Revision
   and resubmission of initially rejected type-1
   applications improve the likelihood of eventual
   funding by a factor of approximately two.

R01 overall success rates then may vary from as little as 9 percent for unsolicited, unamended first submissions to 32.4 percent for continuation grants.

According to NIH, the 2007 success rate for the R03 grant mechanism--often described as a means for smaller, less competitive grants to be obtained--was itself less than 24 percent. Corvo et al. (2008) concluded that the success rates for the schools most successful in obtaining grant awards were likely to be better than the overall success rate for social work schools applying for funding. For example, the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis had, in 2003, a multiyear NIH success rate of over 40 percent (Haywood, 2003). If the probability of being funded is higher for the most successful schools, then the probability for other schools is likely to be lower. NIH has described a "perfect storm" of budgetary impacts that have resulted in a doubling of applications for research funds and a 40 percent decline in success rates since 1998 (Zerhouni, 2006).

Although there may be some inconsistencies by source, data from by the NIH Office of Extramural Research (2008) indicated that a total of 27,850 R01 grants were made in 2007 in the amount of approximately $10,045,800,665, for an average of about $360,000 per grant. These amounts are larger than those reported on the NIH Office of Extramural Research (n.d.)Web page by a factor of four, but NIH staff has confirmed their accuracy (personal communication, W. Schaffer, research training officer, September 4, 2008).

In terms of opportunity costs, the NIH report of 27,850 R01 proposals funded in 2007 suggests conservatively that about 111,400 proposals were not funded (a 1:5 success rate). A rough and highly conservative calculation of a one-month full-time estimate (FTE) to complete an NIH R01 leads to over 12,000 lost academic year FTEs. To put it another way, the equivalent of over 12,000 university professors' time for an entire academic year was spent on planning, writing, and submitting unfunded proposals to NIH for R01 proposals in 2007.

DISCUSSION: SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH AND THE FEDERAL FUNDING OF SCIENCE

Federally funded research grants are extremely competitive. In the case of NIH, applications have increased faster than stagnating budgets, success rates have declined, and competition has become more intense. Grants to schools of social work are a tiny part of overall NIH funding, and the number and amount of those grants has declined. Only a tiny fraction of schools of social work can compete consistently (or at all) for these grants. Outside of a handful of successful schools, the probability of receiving an R01 (or even the smaller R03) is small. Opportunity costs incurred in pursuing unfunded research grants are high.

The overall NIH strategy of funding research is based on medical models often requiring expensive equipment, technological sophistication, and the support of specialized research centers. The implied evolutionary view of research development embedded in the NIH model points toward a preferred end state. This end state is a large, specialized research center, school, or department that has outcompeted other entities for the purpose of implementing large-scale research projects. This model operates independently from content or research topic issues and may be variably salient among institutes. For example, NIMH (the largest NIH funding source for social work research) has had variable emphases on community-based projects with causal attributions to social factors in the 1960s (O'Connor, 2001) and more recently has been criticized for alternatively supporting too much or too little basic research (Holden, 2004). In any case, because the number of applications meeting technical or scientific adequacy requirements far exceeds the number of grants available, other factors like applicant reputation, previous grant success, the degree to which the topic of the research proposal is congruent with NIH goals, epistemological assumptions, or ideology may account for funding preferences.

While striving toward value neutrality, the NIH (n.d.) review process must at some point include policy, political, or ideological preferences. A careful reading of the following summary reveals several key moments when the review process departs from the purely scientific (indicated in boldface):

The first level of review is carried out by a Scientific Review Group (SRG) composed primarily of non-federal scientists who have expertise in relevant scientific disciplines and current research areas. The second level of review is performed by Institute and Center (IC) National Advisory Councils or Boards. Councils are composed of both scientific and lay members chosen for their expertise, interest, or activity in matters related to health and disease. Only applications that are favorably recommended by both the SRG and the Advisory Council may be recommended for funding....

* NIH program staff members examine application priority scores and consider these against the IC's needs.

* Program staff provide(s) a grant-funding plan to the Advisory Board/Council.

* The Advisory Board/Council also considers the IC's goals and needs and advises the IC director.

* The IC director makes final funding decisions based on staff and Advisory Council/ Board advice.

From the outside, we cannot ascertain the proportions of influence from various sectors or interests in the review process, but simply note their potential impact on proposal review. However, our analysis here is not a narrow critique of specific ideological or policy prohibitions on certain research topics (for example, stem cell research). Those prohibitions are often explicit, obvious, and regrettable. Here we are more concerned with the subtle criteria (for example, theoretical bias, investigator reputation, relationships) brought to bear when the number of methodologically competitive proposals far exceeds the number of grants and amount of financial support available to fund them.

NIH is not alone in being vulnerable to extraneous influences in decision making.

For example, Slaughter (2001), in a critique of NSF, wrote, "What does peer review mean, when corporate scientists are included, as is increasingly the case on NSF panels? What happens to academic freedom and 'curiosity driven' research when government agencies set research agendas to maximize economic productivity?" (p. 394). Ross (2000), a former National Institute of Justice (NIJ) social science analyst, described a sort of "old boys' network" at NIJ where few research grants were made outside of a preferred circle of individuals, universities, corporations, and professional organizations.

How should academic social work think about the implications and effects of the governmental funding of research? Given the tiny probability of grant success outside the top 20 or so schools, is NIH as a source of funding even broadly relevant to social work research? Clearly, the relatively miniscule proportion of R01 grants made to schools of social work raises the question of governmental funding of research's widespread significance. If the actual numbers and dollar amounts of research grants made to academic social work are small and their impacts on total budgets in the profession insignificant, what is their importance? The ability to successfully compete for R01 or equivalent grants has great symbolic value, and although the overall contribution to the budgets of academic social work may be small, the financial benefit to individual schools may be quite large, supporting faculty and doctoral student salaries and providing generous indirect cost support to the home universities. Schools that receive federal funding for research may be perceived as superior to those that do not. For example, all schools of social work in the top 10 published in the rankings by U.S.

News and World Report (USNWR) (2008a) were also the top 10 NIH grant recipients over the preceding years 1993 to 2005, except for two. That is, there was only an incongruity of two schools between USNWR rankings and NIH grant rankings. That pattern remains consistent throughout the top 20 USNWR rankings, with only four schools not also being in the top NIH grouping. The Spearman's rho correlation between USNWR rankings and number of NIH grants received from 1993 to 2005 is -.674 (p = .01). It is important to note that the USNWR reputational (2008b) rankings of schools of social work are purely reputational. That is, the rankings are based entirely on how schools are perceived by other schools (that is, their deans, directors, and so forth). No objective measures (for example, graduates' scores on licensure exams) are used to establish these rankings. It appears that prominent success in securing NIH funding is an important element in schools' reputations. That criterion of the rankings, however, is limited to very few schools.

In spite of the zero-sum nature of grant competition and limited availability of NIH (and other federal) research funding for schools of social work, federal research grant success may create aspirational expectations for many schools. By this we mean that schools that are not organizationally positioned to be competitive for federal research grants aspire to be so. Those aspirations shape expectations for faculty grant-seeking activities. More subtly, to the extent that the research agendas of the top schools are shaped by governmental priorities and the extent that those agendas influence how second- and third-tier schools conceptualize their research agendas, a sort of trickle-down effect may occur. Those second- and third-tier schools that aspire to be first-tier schools emulate the topics and strategies believed to produce grant success. Should these top schools be viewed as exemplars whose achievements serve as guiding lights that all can achieve? Or are they qualitatively different from most schools, and is that difference, given the rarity of funding, something that cannot be widely or effectively replicated? Remember, this is a zero-sum game, with increasing competition and diminishing or stagnant resources: In 2007, NIH made only about 20 grants to social work researchers, and not all of them were in schools of social work. How likely is it that second- and third-tier schools of social work can outcompete not only the top schools of social work, but also medical schools and professions with longer funded-research histories and traditions? The pursuit of federal research grants is further driven by the increasing importance of those grants as factors in faculty tenure decisions (Hosek et al., 2005)

This is not a discussion of whether social work should be "scientific." It should. This is a discussion of the assumptions and implications of a set of interorganizational relationships. Should the normative model of research development embedded in NIH, or other federal funders, shape our conceptualization of research topics? The cumulative historical weight of knowledge building in biomedical research and the precision inherent in biomedical measurement leads to quite a different place, epistemologically, than do the nascent struggles to even specify variable definitions we find in much contemporary social work research. This is also not a discussion of whether social work can compete for funding with "more scientific" disciplines. It is more a discussion of how attempting to compete may alter our theoretical and philosophical orientations to knowledge in unintended ways. Is it a matter of social work being in the early stages of an evolutionary path toward scientific legitimacy, or is social work being drawn toward a certain narrow epistemology that may undermine the more critical aspects of the profession?

One result of the normative model of research development embedded in NIH is the production of a "winner-takes-all" set of outcomes in regard to social work research. It is likely that the organizational arrangements and expertise needed to secure NIH funding are more widely distributed among medical schools, for example, and less widely distributed among schools of social work. Corvo et al. (2008) found that NIH grant success in schools of social work was not only concentrated in relatively few schools, but that grant success was associated with several key organizational and institutional factors. Among them were having doctoral program in the school of social work; having no BSW program; being a freestanding school, not part of larger college; having a medical school in the home university; and the overall federal funding ranking of the home university being high. Given that grant success is restricted to a relatively few schools and that those schools are distinguished by key organizational features, this suggests that the organizational arrangements necessary to consistently secure NIH funding may be associated with obtaining relatively few but relatively large grants. Given the low success rates, the few grants actually made to academic social work, and the significant opportunity costs involved, it is possible that it is not a rational economic decision for any but a few schools of social work to pursue NIH funding.

We have looked primarily at NIH--not, as we said earlier, necessarily as a representative institution, but because it is the largest funder of academic civilian research and its data on funding are available and usable in a searchable form. Other federal agencies also make grants for research, but they do so in smaller amounts and in diminished relevance to academic social work (for example, agencies of the Departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture; NSF) (Scriven, Lowman, & Casey, 2007).

With that in mind, we turn to one other set of factors that may hamper schools of social work from wider success in competing for NIH funding--hidden effects of race and gender. Shavers et al. (2005) reported that only 3.2 percent of principal investigators on NIH research grants are African American, Hispanic, or Native American, whereas those groups represent 25 percent of the U.S. population. Hosek et al. (2005), in a RAND report on gender differences in federal funding of research, stated:

   When [federal funding] agencies direct more
   funding to certain disciplines and topics, they
   improve the funding odds for the researchers
   who propose research in high priority areas. To
   the extent that women are disproportionately
   represented in either high-priority or low-priority
   areas, their grant funding may be higher
   or lower than funding for men. The agencies
   also select peer reviewers, establish the review
   process and criteria, and make the final funding
   decisions based on review results. The stated
   goal is to award research funding on the basis of
   scientific merit and to avoid bias. Nevertheless,
   reviewers' judgments about merit will reflect
   their own research orientation and may have
   unintended effects on the success rates for different
   groups of applicants--by gender or other
   characteristics. (pp. 7-8)

To the extent that the faculties of schools of social work contain greater numbers of female and minority professors, lower grant success rates for these schools may be attributable to the lower rates of grants made to the research interests of those groups.

It is clear that not all schools and departments of social work can successfully compete for NIH research grants. Other funding sources (for example, other governmental funders or private foundations) may or may not have similar success rates. Those schools that are successful in pursuing NIH grants represent the winners in a highly competitive zero-sum game. Theories of accumulative advantage suggest that it is easier to remain on top than it is to get there (Corvo et al., 2008), so those who aspire to become competitive with the top schools have a difficult task ahead. We need to have our eyes open about the real probabilities of grant success and what it takes to consistently produce funded proposals.

The ecology of NIH research funding has in it the evolutionary assumptions of a biomedical research model--start small; get bigger, more sophisticated, and specialized then outcompete others. If those assumptions were modified in recognition of the differences found in social and behavioral research associated with the breadth of social work scholarship, we might see something like a transfer of some R01 funds for an expansion of R03 funding. Such a program would highlight the value of these smaller grants as sufficient in and of themselves to the process of knowledge building and not primarily as the preliminary means to developing larger, more expensive research projects or centers. Instead of the 20 NIH grants made last year to social work researchers, what would be the result of 200 smaller grants? Certainly more schools of social work would be doing funded research. With more opportunities, the success rate is likely to greatly increase. As the number of grants available approaches the number of applications meeting technical or scientific adequacy requirements, other "nonscientific" factors like applicant reputation, previous grant success, or reviewer ideology become less important as screening criteria. This scenario may be unlikely, but is it any more unlikely than the probabilities of most schools of social work obtaining a federal research grant under the current system? Although the grantor-grantee relationship may reiterate the pattern in the larger economy in which few major players dominate many near-monopolistic economic sectors, it does not necessarily bind us to assimilate this trend in the scientific community.

If the number of grants increases and funds become more even in their distribution to more schools, more variety in topics, in questions, arid in methods become possible. This may be where social work can make its best contribution: not as a poor cousin--trying to mimic large-scale, medical models of research--but as a source of a multiplicity of innovative and provocative ideas about human interventions and systems change.

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Original manuscript received February 24, 2009

Final revision received October 19, 2009

Accepted January 14, 2010

Kenneth Corvo, PhD, is associate professor, and Wan-Yi Chen, PhD, is assistant professor, School of Social Work, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Patrick Selmi, PhD, is associate professor, School of Social Work, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Address correspondence to Kenneth N. Corvo, 407 Sims Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-6350; e-mail: kncorvo@syr.edu.