Shaping Grant Proposal Success: Commonality and Individuality in the Approaches of Experienced Principal Investigators

• In Event: 77.048 - Writing Development Across the Researcher's Career: From First-Year Ph.D. Researcher to Experienced Principal Investigator

Abstract

In the competitive environment of academia, the grant proposal is one of the highest-stakes and most challenging genres of research writing (Tardy 2003). The ongoing rise in applications for grant funding and stagnating growth of public funding of research) put increasing pressure on principal investigators (PIs) to ensure that their proposals credibly stand out from competition during review and decision making. But despite interest in writing studies in the structure and features of proposal texts and in the roles of text-external interactions between PIs and other funding stakeholders, how successful PIs synthesize their own experience in these activities to conceive persuasion in proposal writing is not well known.

To explore this issue the study situates the PI within the interlinked dimensions of research career development: intellectual, intertextual, interpersonal, and institutional (McAlpine et al 2014); and of knowledge production and (e)valuation: institutional, interactional, and emotional (Camic et al 2011). It is furthermore understood that the proposal is discipline specific (Myers 1990, Tardy 2011) and must address the current-most exigencies of the targeted funder. The analysis is based on data collected within the frame of an on-going qualitative multi-case study of grant funding success. Principal consultants for the study are three highly successful PIs in the sciences who also serve on funding agencies’ proposal evaluation panels. Data include in-depth interviews with the participating PIs; examinations of their proposal drafts, final submissions, reviewer comments, and decision letters; agency documents and websites, university-based agency information sessions; perspectives of institutional stakeholders of the funding system: an agency-based program administrator, a review committee chair, a review panel member, and university research administrators. All data were analyzed manually to capture individuality in PI’s conceptualizing of proposal writing and to render it richly nuanced.

While their paths to and interpretations of success vary, PIs approach it as a highly interactive construct and an on-going long-term investment. Several notions emerged as keystones to the PIs’ thinking about and evolving success in their proposal writing. Their approaches are shaped by diverse determinants, highlighting individual nature of success. But all the PIs draw extensively on their past and present experience, on their on-going disciplinary interactions, on their interpretation of the exigencies of the funding context, and on their insider knowledge of dynamics of decision making on review panels. Findings suggest a range of strategies that successful PIs evolve to conceive persuasion in ways that are not only proposal genre-appropriate but also competitive.

Authors

• Larissa Yousoubova, McGill University

• Lynn McAlpine, McGill University