R21-Exploratory/Development Grants

The Behavioral and Social Research Program (BSR) will accept applications in its seven major areas of emphasis, including:

1. Health Disparities;
2. Aging Minds;
3. Increasing Health Expectancy;
4. Health, Work, and Retirement;
5. Interventions and Behavior Change;
6. Genetics, Behavior, and the Social Environment; and
7. The Burden of Illness and the Efficiency of Health Systems.

We are especially interested in applications in the following areas:

1. Reasoning and Decision-Making:
   • Applied studies of quantitative reasoning (e.g., medical treatment decision-making, retirement and savings planning)
   • Intervention studies to enhance quantitative decision-making.
      
2. Cognition in Context:
   • Studies to understand how different contextual factors produce systematic variation in cognitive functioning and performance.
   • Enhanced understanding of how the contexts of school, workplace, or interpersonal and social networks can shape cognition over the life course. 
   • Additional contextual factors of interest include early life experiences, physical and social characteristics of the environment at home, and the attitudes and beliefs of others about cognitive aging.
      
3. Behavioral Medicine: Pilot studies of basic processes in behavioral medicine are solicited, including: 
   • Bio-behavioral linkages between social and physiological risk factors of illness and disease, and clinical and/or biological changes associated with these factors. 
   • Linkages between all levels of social and psychological factors, community to clinical outcomes, should be addressed.  Evidence that these studies will lead to interventions that impact the health and well-being of the elderly are requested. 
   • Multi-level approaches, integrating social, psychological, and biomedical concepts and approaches are solicited (see New Horizons in Health: An Integrative Approach. National Academy Press, 2001).
      
4. Retirement: 
   • Development of new methodologies, such as agent-based models, for projecting complex social phenomena associated with the older population;
   • Development of approaches for looking at the neural basis of economic and social decisions in later life.
      
5. International Networks in Population Aging:  
   • Development of methodologies and mechanisms that facilitate the harmonization (or, in some cases, the standardization) of data collected in both industrialized (see Preparing for an Aging World: The Case for Cross-National Research, National Research Council, 2001) and less developed countries.
   • Development of methods for calibrating health and well-being across populations.
      
6. Developing and testing improved summary measures of health for use in sample surveys across different populations.
    
7. Developing more effective methods for measuring positive and negative affect and well-being, and investigating their separate effects on health.
    
8. Studies analyzing the impact of research on health and well-being.
    
9. Meta studies of the research process, including developing of metrics to measure vitality and the rate of progress in social and behavioral research. 
    
10. Studies of the pricing of drugs used by the elderly.
     
11. Studies that translate what we have learned about aging processes from the basic behavioral and social sciences to practical outcomes, including new technologies for the benefit of the aged or stimulate new “use-inspired” basic research in the behavioral and social sciences.