Strategies for Effective NSF Proposal Design and Development

1. Justin M. Nolan Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology Strategies for Effective NSF Proposal Design and Development

2. Introduction • Begin with a broad, but focused statement about the present intellectual or theoretical orientation of your discipline • Cite key scholars whose work is considered foundational, pivotal, or path-breaking, and what these works collectively reveal, in concert. • Clearly convey how your work will extend a conceptual model, or advance existing knowledge of a problem, a topic, or a domain in a ways that’s creative and feasible.

3. Research Objectives • Enumerate the goals of your work. • Liaise these goals into a statement about significance- • What’s fundamentally, ineffably important about this work? • How will the work contribute to parallel lines of inquiry in your discipline?

4. Background and Rationale • Provide a synopsis of the discipline’s intellectual roots, citing seminal works • Demonstrate your grasp of the academic scope of your discipline • Identify, if possible, a gap in the literature that will be filled by work you propose • Describe how your work will address and propel conceptions of your discipline

5. Description of Study Region(if applicable) • Familiarize the reviewers with the region or group of people you intend to study. • Humanize your population with relevant background information, including historical, socio-cultural, demographic, and economic information if possible. • Provide a map of the study region (if applicable)

6. Plan of Work • Articulate a logical research design • Illustrate the procedures to be used • Present your work as a generative process, comprised of three-four “phases” • Demonstrate how each phase is designed to address a research goal, and describe how specific data-collection methods relate meaningfully to these goals.

7. Research Timeline Example PHASE I (May1-June 30, 2007): Preliminary Data Collection and Preparation: Prepare interview and survey materials; contact informants and conduct first interview phase; administer free-list task and ethnographic survey to informants; create databases on ANTHROPAC 4.95 and SPSS for interview results. Begin collecting plants as listed by informants. PHASE II (June 30-September 15, 2007): Continued Data Collection and Analysis: Complete plant collection and mounting for all listed species; conduct second interview phase; administer pile-sort task; completion of free-list and pile-sort analysis using ANTHROPAC’s corresponding programs. PHASE III (September 15-November 30, 2007): Final Data Analysis and Reporting: Complete rank-order analysis for all reported plant families; collect historical and archival data for commonly reported species; write dissertation.

8. Significance of Research • Summarize the reasons why your research is vital and ineluctable on multiple levels • Convey why your proposal, if funded, could (e.g.) • inform policy-makers with data, rendered meaningful to multiple audiences…. • generate creative and effective solutions for real-world problems… • accelerate new exploratory avenues of inquiry within your academic field… • Provide evidence of potential for innovative, productive, interdisciplinary collaborations that link your work to other, related disciplines.