Grants Program
The DRRC has pursued its research mission in part through its research funding program that is available to Northwestern faculty and students, and through compiling and distributing the resulting research papers in the DRRC Working Paper Series. Below are the guidelines for the DRRC's grants program. If you are a Northwestern University faculty member or Ph.D. student and wish to be put on our mailing list for grant proposal forms, please email your request to drrc@kellogg.northwestern.edu

I. Applicants: Principal investigators must be affiliated with Northwestern as full-time faculty or graduate students during the grant period. Co-investigators need not be affiliated with Northwestern.

II. Guidelines for DRRC Grant Proposals: DRRC funds empirical research on conflict, broadly construed. We are open to a variety of methods: experimental, field, modeling, etc. The grants committee looks for several things in a proposal:

What is the research question?

How will answering this research question contribute to our understanding of conflict?

What are the hypotheses?

What conflict theory guides this research? 

How are the hypotheses consistent with the conflict theory driving the research?

How will conflict and other variables in the study be manipulated/ measured/assessed?

What will be the source of the data?

Does the logic and the theory in the proposal suggest that the hypotheses are reasonable? Just as important, is hypothesis disconfirmation also possible? (Research that can identify when an effect occurs and when it doesn’t is powerful.)

How will answering these questions contribute significantly to our understanding of conflict?

III. Criteria for awarding grants:
Academic merit
- Originality
- Importance
- Interdisciplinary nature
- Academic-practice mix

Promise
- Likelihood of yielding publishable material
- Appropriateness for Center working paper series. The grants committee looks particularly favorably on proposals that investigate interpersonal conflicts and disputes. Our focus tends to be psychological. Successful proposals tend to make meaningful contributions to conflict theory. Research that includes conflict as a central issue are generally viewed more favorably than research that includes issues related to conflict only tangentially
- Likelihood of generating outside funding (Committee will look favorably on matching funds or seed money requests)
- Likelihood of investigators making a contribution to Center activities

Types of support
- Funds for paying research participants
- Funds for travel that is necessay for data collection
- Remuneration for required support personnel, e.g., transcribers, research assistants. etc.
- Essential research support (e.g., hardware, software, communications, supplies, travel, funds for conferences)
- Data tapes

Types of requests that do not receive support
- Books
- Summer support
- Subsistence funding

III. When to apply:
Regular requests - there are two cycles per year, in October and April.

Ad hoc requests - We are happy to review ad hoc requests for emergency funding and special requests such as travel (Emergency = research will suffer from funding delay).

IV. Application Procedures
Submit an electronic version via email to
Nancy McLaughlin:n-mclaughlin@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Contents
- Cover form (PDF 4 KB / 1 page)
- Proposal (5 page limit) describing the research and justifying the request for funds
- Qualifications of proposer to carry out the research; brief vitae
- Budget, including funding priorities, if appropriate
- Statement of current or applied-for support
- For student proposers - name and telephone number of a faculty member familiar with student's work.

Referee procedure
- Each proposal is reviewed by at least three readers, either grants committee members or outside referees selected by them. The committee meets to discuss all of the proposals.
- Proposal writers receive a decision letter with substantive feedback soon after the committee has met (usually within 14 days of the submission date).

Ad hoc support requests
- Request and brief justification
- Each proposal is read by at least two readers
- Decisions are usually made within 7 days

V. Product
The DRRC expects that all fund recipients will submit their work as a working paper to the DRRC working paper series. The DRRC does not need progress reports, but we also do not award additional funds for new research until after we have received a working paper from prior funded research.