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6
Strengthening Funding Opportunities
and Training Models for the Future of
Integrated Family Research Studies
T
he excitement and promise of the new approaches to family research
across the behavioral and biobehavioral sciences present new chal-
lenges to funding and training institutions. As an increasingly mul-
tidisciplinary field, family research requires funding and training mecha-
nisms that extend across disciplinary boundaries. Students and researchers
at all stages of their careers need opportunities to learn new and inte-
grated sets of methods in family research and to work with colleagues in
related fields. The needs of junior and senior researchers in this regard are
different, but funding and training opportunities are necessary for both.
Researchers need support for integrated and mixed-methods studies, such
as quantitative-qualitative and biobehavioral family research.
This chapter summarizes the remarks by representatives of three fed-
eral agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, each
of whom described the agency’s interest in supporting additional family
research. It also describes two brief presentations on multidisciplinary
training opportunities and the comments of workshop participants on the
challenges and potential of multidisciplinary work.
Combining disciplinary approaches requires innovative methodolo-
gies, institutional and funding support, and a sustained commitment to
collaboration. An issue emphasized by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, professor of
education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was how disci-
plines learn and evolve. They do so, he said, in part by picking up and using
new theories and methods from other disciplines. Under what conditions
is this process most successful? Do disciplines pick new theories and meth-
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74 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
ods selectively from adjacent disciplines and then adapt them to their own
purposes, as when one language adopts words from another? Or are new
theories and methods transferred intact among disciplines, in the same way
that a person might become fluent in two languages? “This is very much a
practical issue, because methods are the syntax in which scientific compe-
tence is evaluated,” Yoshikawa said. “Levels of monolingual and bilingual
competence are associated with academic success in your career, so this
is something we have to think about when we mix theories and methods
across careers and not just studies.”
Institutions also shape the policies and practices of science. Institutional
incentives shape the topics that are studied, the methods used to study
those topics, and the pathways of careers. These incentives help create
models of learning that are marked by particular milestones. For example,
tenure is a developmental milestone for researchers that can influence the
content and methods of research. From this perspective, one can think of
interventions designed to increase the diversity of research, the extent to
which it extends across disciplines, its use of technology, access and equity
issues, and so on.
Access and equity are especially important considerations, Yoshikawa
said. Multidisciplinary projects in family research are usually started by
senior investigators. The question then becomes whether institutional
policies increase or reduce inequality in access to learning opportunities
across different methods. “Do the more connected simply become better
connected?”
MULTIDISCIPLINARY FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
The mission of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), said
Cheryl Anne Boyce, is to lead the nation in bringing the power of science
to bear on drug abuse and addiction. That charge has two critical compo-
nents: strategic support and conduct of research across a broad range of
disciplines and ensuring the rapid and effective dissemination and use of
the results of that research to improve prevention, treatment, and policy
as it relates to drug abuse and addiction.
To achieve this mission, NIDA funds a wide variety of researchers—
doctoral, clinical, and master’s-level investigators—to “produce strong
research evidence and answer the problems to improve the nation’s
health.” When initially reviewing a proposal or project, Boyce tends not
to know what discipline people are in, because the projects NIDA sup-
ports are problem focused.
Yet NIDA faces the problem of a relative lack of multidisciplinary
research teams, she said. NIDA supports grants with multiple principal
investigators, enabling the creation of such teams. But this mechanism is
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STRENGTHENING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND TRAINING MODELS
used less than she expected. Particularly with family research, in which
many disciplines are often involved, there is great potential through the
use of multiple methods in research. There also are opportunities for the
development of new technologies that draw on mixed methods, such as
community-based participatory research using digital technologies. “We
want the investigator to come up with the bright ideas,” Boyce observed.
Similarly, most of the training grants supported by NIDA are general
rather than discipline specific. Various mechanisms exist for National
Institutes of Health (NIH) training grants, including fellowships, men-
tored career awards, mid-career awards, and senior career awards. In
addition, short-term training opportunities are available that are multi-
disciplinary and relevant to family research.
Qualitative research is an important part of NIDA’s research on sub-
stance use, Boyce said. But its value needs to be supported by showing
how results can be obtained and enhanced through multiple methods. For
example, a growing area of interest for NIDA is the families of veterans,
and this area of research can draw on many disciplinary perspectives.
Wendy Nilsen discussed the status of multidisciplinary research
through the perspective of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Research (OBSSR) at NIH. The mission of the office is to stimulate behav-
ioral and social science research throughout NIH and to integrate these
areas more fully into the NIH health research enterprise, thereby improv-
ing the understanding, treatment, and prevention of disease. OBSSR is
located in the Office of the Director, which has a central location across
all of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH. “We at NIH want to improve
the country’s health and expand our knowledge, and we need multiple
methods to do this.”
Family research can be found throughout NIH. For example, the
National Human Genome Research Institute has emphasized the impor-
tance of obtaining family health histories as part of the biomedical infor-
mation collected in medical interviews. Much of the family research
supported by NIH requires the involvement of multidisciplinary, interdis-
ciplinary, and transdisciplinary teams, said Nilsen. “Complex questions
take complex methods,” she said. Researchers need to be local advocates
to support this work and develop research projects to take advantage of
these mechanisms.
Prevention, a special focus of OBSSR, involves a very broad range of
biological and social factors. For example, 40 percent of premature deaths
are related to behavioral and social factors (Schroeder, 2007), and many
causes of health disparities have their roots in social and environmental
factors (Wong et al., 2002). Working on these kinds of issues, said Nilsen,
requires teams with a history of commitment to collaboration, institu-
tional support, and strong leadership.
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76 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
She also briefly discussed the Basic Behavioral and Social Science
Opportunity Network or OppNet, which is a trans-NIH initiative to sup-
port the development of basic behavioral and social science research at
NIH.
Susan Jekielek described the functions of the Office of Planning,
Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) at the Administration for Children and
Families (ACF), which is responsible for federal programs that promote
the economic and social well-being of families, children, individuals, and
communities. Examples of programs and services administered by ACF
include adoption and foster care, child abuse and neglect, the child care
subsidy program, the Head Start program, strengthening families and
responsible fatherhood, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and
refugee resettlement. OPRE is the principal advisor to the assistant sec-
retary for ACF. It provides guidance, analysis, technical assistance, and
oversight to ACF programs on strategic planning aimed at measurable
results; performance measurement; research and evaluation methodolo-
gies; model development and demonstration testing; statistical, policy,
and program analysis; and dissemination of research findings.
Though few OPRE grants involve training, they do support an effort
to train researchers in policy-related work. The office supports dissertation
grants for child care and Head Start researchers, along with workshops
and meetings intended to advance and disseminate research methods.
Requests for proposals from OPRE would be unlikely to focus specifi-
cally on multiple methods. But the research being requested by its nature
requires a variety of methods, including mixed qualitative and quantita-
tive research; in fact, almost every session at the IOM workshop included
research funded by OPRE. Mixed methods are particularly important in
understanding diverse populations and the use of services by low-income
families, Jekielek said.
An example of such work is the research conducted under the healthy
marriage grant program, which has examined relationships among low-
income couples. Prior to this program, most of the measures in this area
were developed for middle-class couples. The program has advanced
research in this area by supporting cognitive interviewing focus groups
and survey testing to design family interaction measures that are appro-
priate for lower income families. The project also plans to archive obser-
vational data for future use.
Another example is OPRE’s support for child care policy grants.
Legislation specifies that parents should be able to get quality child care
that fits their needs when they work. Research supported by the office has
drawn on a variety of data sources, including administrative data, survey
data, and qualitative interviews, to investigate this issue.
A particular challenge in this work, said Jekielek, is the diversity of
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STRENGTHENING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND TRAINING MODELS
immigrant families who speak different languages, which complicates the
process of conducting interviews and surveys. Different groups also can
describe and think about families in different ways, which can pose chal-
lenges for researchers conducting interviews about child care.
OPRE plans to emphasize research on early childhood in the future.
Legislation currently being considered proposes to focus on fatherhood,
families and marriage, and this may be an indication of more research in
this area to come. Home visiting programs are another focus of interest
and may present opportunities for collaboration with researchers from the
health and medical fields.
Finally, Jeffery Evans from the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development (NICHD) discussed funding opportunities there
as well as the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and National Institute
of Nursing Research (NINR). NICHD research covers a wide range of
family-related issues, from demographics to mother-child interactions to
families in rehabilitation. “NIA thinks that aging begins at birth, and we
think that development stops at death, and families are there all along.”
These agencies continue to fund traditional research projects with
principal investigators. But “the wind is blowing in the direction of big
science, and the rules are different in big science,” said Evans. Investiga-
tors need to collaborate with other specialists and build projects that no
one working alone could build. “It’s a clear trend, and that’s where the
translational and policy impact of our science is felt.” The Three City
Study (see Chapter 3) is a good example. The motivating question was
what would happen to children under welfare reform. The study com-
bined a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and the first paper to emerge
from the study, on the behavioral changes accompanying welfare reform,
had an influence on Congress. “It helped answer a big public policy need
of the day.”
In the future, Evans said, a major concern will be decision-making
processes in families. In some ways, families can be like a bank: they
divert resources, money, help, information, and motivation to particular
investments, including children. Government policy has to accommodate
these decisions if it is going to be effective. “Figuring out who makes the
decisions, how those decisions are made, and . . . how government policy
includes them—that’s going to be where a lot of the action is.”
An important emphasis in the biological sciences will be epigenetics—
the chemical and structural alterations in DNA that affect its functioning.
“We’re all epigeneticists, and I think there’s an enormous opportunity for
us to contribute in that direction, and if you’re not training your students
to be able to do it, you’ve trained them right into oblivion.”
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A TOOLBOX FOR FAMILY RESEARCH
Nathan Fox, professor of human development and director of the Child
Development Laboratory at the University of Maryland, described a partic-
ular multidisciplinary project that has special relevance to family research.
Under a cross-institute initiative, a group based at Northwestern University
has been developing a set of measures, known as the NIH Toolbox, that
can be used to assess individuals across four domains: cognition, social
and emotional functioning, motor functioning, and sensory functioning.
The tools have been designed to be used across the life span, have been
validated against “gold standards” in the different fields of research, are
being normed for both English- and Spanish-speaking populations ages
3 to 85, and are freely available for anyone who wants to use them. “As
you can imagine, it was a huge undertaking,” said Fox.
Teams were established for each of the different domains. In each
domain, subdomains were identified, and the subdomains were divided
into tasks. In the domain of cognition, for example, the subdomains
included executive function, episodic memory, processing speed, lan-
guage, working memory, and attention. In the domain of social and emo-
tional functioning, the subdomains were negative affect, positive affect,
stress and self-efficacy, and social relationships. While someone might use
the tools for clinical populations or for populations at risk, the idea was
to norm the measures on typical populations for each subdomain across
age groups.
A major point of discussion has been whether one could identify
subdomains and tasks that could be assessed across development. The
cognition team answered that question in the affirmative, said Fox. “They
felt that you could measure memory processing speed, executive function,
language, starting at age three and going all the way up to eighty-five.”
For many of the subdomains, the motor team and the sensory teams also
answered that question in the affirmative. The socioemotional domain
had some subdomains that were not amenable to work effectively across
age assessments. The social and emotional teams also had to rely on ques-
tionnaires to gather information rather than having direct measures of a
task or subdomain. For children, a caregiver has to fill out questionnaire
items for those younger than age 10; starting at age 10, it was felt that
children could report on each of the subdomains themselves.
The validation phase of the NIH Toolbox is currently ending. In fall
2010, with approval from the Office of Management and Budget, the
measures will be normed in each of these domains with a representative
national sample in both Spanish and English. Within a year, said Fox, this
set of tools will be available, individually or in combination, to researchers
from the NIH website.
The use of these particular measures in family research will need to be
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STRENGTHENING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND TRAINING MODELS
investigated, he said. For example, the toolbox has a set of demographic
questionnaires that may be useful in characterizing households and the
marital or cohabitation status of couples. According to Fox, the toolbox is
a measure of individual competence across a wide range of domains and
can be a useful adjunct in family research.
TRAINING
Andrew Fuligni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and
of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, identified
seven features of successful multidisciplinary training programs. First,
they are problem focused. Successful programs have identified very spe-
cific problems or, in the case of longer training programs, several linked
problems that can be investigated. “If you stick to those problems, then
it’s much easier to be interdisciplinary, because the methods you choose
depend on the problem to solve. . . . You get people to identify with the
problem rather than with the method.”
Successful programs also have explicit requirements and incentives
that promote the use of multiple methods. Some require students to have
mentors in two or more disciplines. Others require dissertation commit-
tees made up of people from different disciplines or an internship year in
the laboratory of someone who is outside a person’s department. “These
can be tricky, but they have been successful when they’re explicit.”
Successful training programs are multigenerational, with the old
teaching the young and the young teaching the old. If faculty members
have to be involved with interdisciplinary training, new ideas filter up to
them, “and that’s when you have a quicker impact on the field and shap-
ing what’s going on.”
Successful programs are sustainable. Small seed grants can enable a
few people in one department to initiate a much larger multidepartment
effort. Another possibility is to encourage a journal to devote a special
section to a multidisciplinary topic or sponsor such a gathering at a sci-
entific meeting.
Successful programs are challenging for participants and do not shy
away from what appear to be “dumb questions.” People working outside
their own fields sometimes have to ask such questions. This can be an
uncomfortable situation, but if someone wants to question methods or a
way of thinking, he or she has to be willing to discuss the issue. People
should not harangue each other, because training cannot be productive in
such a climate. But people have to be able and willing to ask questions.
To be successful, programs need collaborative and creative personali-
ties. People can be self-selected, but, if so, the program needs to be explicit
about who should become involved.
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Finally, students need to remain connected to their core disciplines.
“Many of our students still have to operate within the traditional aca-
demic department structure. There are many students, and we all know
them, who end up being very creative, very multidisciplinary, but soci-
ology doesn’t call them a sociologist, or psychology won’t call them a
psychologist, and so on down the line. It can be very difficult for them
to get a job, so they can end up many times . . . with positions that aren’t
really full-money positions, or they’re not core in one department. That
will create attrition at a high rate from those kinds of creative people.”
Researchers can be multidisciplinary, but they still need to know how to
talk with people in a core department, and also how to review proposals
and papers in their discipline.
Sally Powers, professor of psychology at the University of Massachu-
setts, Amherst, made several similar points in discussing local barriers to
faculty using integrated methods. Learning and using mixed methods in
interdisciplinary research is costly in terms of ego and time, she noted.
People are trying to do things they were not trained to do, and collabora-
tive work takes time. Also, institutional infrastructure is typically not set
up to support interdisciplinary work. The question then becomes how to
change the infrastructure at the university and departmental levels so that
faculty can collaborate and learn new methods.
Powers identified four things that are needed to make such a change.
The first is release time to engage in learning translational and collabora-
tive skills. And this often has to happen before a faculty member receives
funding to buy that release time from an institution.
An institution also needs a risk-taking climate to allow experts in one
field to become learners in another. This is different from a safe climate
in which no risks are taken. Powers said, “At the beginning of an inter-
disciplinary seminar, we pass out large white flags, and those white flags
symbolize, ‘I give up. I cannot understand your language. I don’t know
what you’re talking about. Please help me.’”
Concrete goals are needed to help overcome the slow pace of learning
to translate and collaborate. Even a small grant can keep people focused
on concrete goals so that they do not feel that they are wasting their time.
Finally, faculty members and institutions need a conviction that sci-
ence will progress faster with mixed methods. Administrators, chairs,
center directors, vice chancellors of research, and others all need to be
convinced that collaborative research will pay off in the long run. To make
these arguments requires conviction and work.
The impetus to make these changes does not come just from institu-
tions or department chairs, said Powers. It comes from the faculty mem-
bers who are doing the work. Center directors, chairs, and deans may be
looking for ways to support interdisciplinary research, but they will not
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necessarily take the time to figure out what will make a program work.
Faculty members need to go to them and say, “Here’s what I really need,
and here are some suggestions for how it might work.”
Powers listed three things that faculty members can do or suggest to
others. One is to team teach across disciplines or across methods. Even in
a single department, the qualitative can be combined with the quantita-
tive or the behavioral with the biological. “Pick out someone that you
get along with well, that you don’t mind spending a lot of time with,
and convince your chair that team teaching is going to be incredibly
important for your students.” Faculty members and students can learn
a tremendous amount about other departments and disciplines through
such arrangements.
Second, interdisciplinary grant-writing programs can bring faculty
members together to learn about and collaborate on multidisciplinary
research. At the Center for Research on Families at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, the Family Research Scholars Program brings
six faculty members together for a year in an interdisciplinary seminar.
Each of them applies to be part of the program, and each of them writes
a research grant focused on some type of family research. They read each
other’s grants, give peer support, and receive other supports to develop
their ability to talk across disciplines.
Also, multidisciplinary initiatives need to involve all levels of faculty,
not just assistant professors. Full professors, mid-level professors, and
assistant professors all benefit from multidisciplinary exchanges.
Short training courses on mixed-method approaches can be extremely
valuable. Deans and chairs should be convinced that funding to attend
these short courses will pay off with larger grant funding in the future. 1
Faculty members pursuing interdisciplinary funding need to make
the case that these are new grants that would not have been obtained
without support from the institution. “We’ve been successful with that,”
Power said. “The money comes back and supports course releases for the
next class of faculty that are going to do this, and thus far we’ve had more
than enough to support that.”
The bottom line, said Powers, is “to advocate at your local level,
because it is changes in your daily life that are going to make this
workable.”
1 For examples of these courses, see http://www.qualquant.net/training/scrm.htm#offer
(accessed January 24, 2011).
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DISCUSSION
During the discussion period, Jane Guyer emphasized the importance
of planning grants in the formation of multidisciplinary projects. Putting
together such projects can be labor-intensive and difficult, and planning
grants could overcome some of those difficulties.
Jeffery Evans observed that NIH does provide planning grants for
that purpose. Another way to support early-stage projects is through
conferences and workshops. For example, with the establishment of clini-
cal networks, a planning phase is built into the project. “The larger the
enterprise, the more planning you need.” Planning grants and related
funding also can be used to conduct short-term training to familiarize
team members with a new method. In addition, supplemental grants to
an existing grant can be used to add a new method to an existing study.
A workshop participant described the difficulties in shortening a
paper about a complex multimethods research project to meet the space
limitations of a prominent journal. Roger Bakeman observed that journals
are unlikely to devote huge amounts of space to multimethod studies,
but supplemental and supporting materials that are not published can
be posted on the Internet. That way, people can examine the data from
which conclusions are drawn and ask their own questions of the data and
the analysis.
In response to a question about whether the NIH Toolbox will have
instruments that can be used with young children in culturally diverse
settings, Nathan Fox noted that standardized, normed, valid measures
will not be available for social and emotional development. “It’s a big
hole in the armamentarium of assessment of young children. . . . It’s not
an impossible task. It just requires someone to do the hard work, to create
that battery of measures.” Nor are there any direct measures of parent-
ing, Fox continued, although there are measures of social support and
relationships embedded in parent questionnaires.
Bakeman observed that the way of doing science embodied in the
NIH Toolbox is desirable, but it goes against the scientific culture in some
ways. Science still values individual rather than group contributions.
“Many of us are not full-time researchers. We’re beholden to departments
that expect us to advance, be promoted, sit on committees, teach, do all
kinds of other research, including these elaborate consortium arrange-
ments which are incredibly time-consuming.” Forums are needed that
will encourage and reward the interdisciplinary collegial work, which is
all too rare. Common tools will help, in that they will bridge disciplines.
For family science to be cumulative, measures need to apply across many
different laboratories in a given area of research. “We need measures that
are accepted widely and used in the field.”
Funding agencies could insist that researchers choose from a list
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STRENGTHENING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND TRAINING MODELS
of approved tools, but many researchers would be leery of that kind of
centralized control, Bakeman said. For tools to be used and work across
settings, funding needs to support consortia in which such tools are
employed. “We need to educate our universities and our deans that this
is the right way to go . . . in a culture that largely only understands first-
authored papers.”
How can undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fel-
lows be trained to move between disciplines as well as to become familiar
with the language of disciplines as varied as sociology, demography, neu-
roscience, and developmental psychology? “This is really very difficult,”
said Fox, “and it’s most difficult because graduate students or post-docs
still have to go out and become assistant professors, and they still have
to establish themselves in their departments, generally, with their own
research and with their own laboratory. Multidisciplinary collaboration,
which is really the way to train students and to get them involved in these
kinds of multidisciplinary collaborations, often is frowned upon, interest-
ingly enough, by departments, for individuals who are just starting out.
It’s sort of the luxury of those who already have tenure. That culture has
to change if, in fact, we are going to be training that next generation of
students.”
In putting together a diverse campus, college administrators choose a
diverse range of students, said Bakeman. Perhaps family research needs
to do the same thing by convening people with different skills and areas
of expertise. In that case, an important component of multimethods work
is a culture of mutual respect. “We need to have students who are not
themselves mixed-method competent but are mixed-method literate and
respectful. I’m not sure how to do that—in graduate school we too often
go for that narrow specialization. . . . Again, we need a culture change.”
Bakeman pointed out that relatively few people use observational
methods, often because they think such methods are too expensive and
time-consuming. But modern visual technologies are changing that.
Observations are more accessible to a wider range of people through the
use of digital technologies. If common measures used in multiple inde-
pendent investigations and laboratories were available, data—including
video—could be archived and find many future uses. Data storage is
cheap, although issues of consent need additional consideration. With
major data archives, multiple methods could be brought to bear on the
same data. “We need to create a culture where more work goes into col-
lecting archives, more dissertations are earned, and more promotions
are gained from working with large archival data sets. With multiple
minds looking at similar phenomena that may be the real payoff of mixed
methods.”
Barbara Fiese pointed out that the use of archived videotapes requires
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close cooperation with institutional review boards to make sure that
future uses meet the terms of the original consent. She also observed that
the formation of complex multidisciplinary teams in family research pro-
vides an opportunity to develop a science of team research. Researchers
could look at how people interact on teams, how they train others, and
the effects team participation has on a person’s career trajectory. Such
studies could help inform people make career decisions and could play a
role in tenure reviews.
