Funding Opportunity Number: PAR-22-231
Deadlines: November 16, 2024, February 16, 2024, March 16, 2024
Purpose
This funding announcement solicits R21 grant applications that propose exploratory/developmental research projects that are consistent with the research framework detailed in the 2022-2026 National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) Strategic Plan. This research will be rooted in nursing’s holistic, contextualized approach to understanding people and their health, address the nation’s most pressing and persistent health challenges with a solutions orientation, and employ innovative and rigorous study designs to inform practice and policy.
Background
The NINR 2022-2026 Strategic Plan outlines the Institute’s vision for supporting science that advances our mission: to lead nursing research to solve pressing health challenges and inform practice and policy-optimizing health and advancing health equity into the future. The NINR Strategic Plan presents a research framework that focuses on a holistic, contextualized approach to optimizing health for all people, rather than on specific diseases, life stages, or research topics. The framework builds on the strengths of nursing research, spans the intersection of health care and public health, and encompasses the many settings where nurses partner with individuals, families, and communities in prevention, treatment, and care. Through this framework, NINR seeks to support research conducted by scientists from any discipline that informs practice and policy, and improves health and quality of life for all people, their families and communities, and the society in which they live.
NINR’s research framework includes guiding principles and research lenses that promote innovative and rigorous study designs that look upstream, midstream, and downstream to discover solutions to the nation’s most pressing and persistent health challenges.
Guiding Principles
NINR’s guiding principles describe the qualities that investigators should emphasize in all NINR-supported research. The extent to which studies reflect these principles will factor into funding decisions. NINR will prioritize research that:
- tackles today’s pressing health challenges and stimulates discoveries to prepare for, prevent, or address tomorrow’s challenges;
- discovers solutions across clinical, community, and policy settings to optimize health for individuals, families, communities, and populations;
- advances equity by removing structural barriers from research, cultivating diversity in perspectives and ideas, and fostering inclusion and accessibility in designing, conducting, and participating in research; and;
- is innovative, develops or applies the most rigorous methods, and has the potential for the greatest impact on health.
Research Lenses
NINR identified five complementary and synergistic research lenses that best leverage the strengths of nursing research and promote multilevel approaches, cross-disciplinary and -sectoral collaboration, and community engagement in research. It is important to note that the lenses are not research topics, but rather perspectives through which to consider the full spectrum of nursing research topics that encompass health and illness within the context of people’s lived experiences. These lenses allow nursing research to examine new topics while also allowing scientists to take a different look at long-standing areas of interest. The research lenses are:
- Health Equity: Reduce and ultimately eliminate the systemic and structural inequities that place some at an unfair, unjust, and avoidable disadvantage in attaining their full health potential
- Social Determinants of Heath: Identify effective approaches to improve health and quality of life by addressing the conditions in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, and age
- Population and Community Health: Address critical health challenges at a macro level that persistently affect groups of people with shared characteristics
- Prevention and Health Promotion: Prevent disease and promote health through the continuum of prevention – from primordial to tertiary
- Systems and Models of Care: Address clinical, organizational, and policy challenges through new systems and models of care
NINR-supported researchers have the flexibility to apply a single lens or a combination of lenses in their study designs. NINR encourages researchers to view the health equity and social determinants of health lenses as primary foci through which to consider the population and community health, prevention and health promotion, and systems and models of care lenses. Applicants are encouraged to review the NINR Strategic Plan for more information on each of the research lenses.
Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives
Applications should include a Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP) submitted as Other Project Information as an attachment (see Section IV; further below).
Non-Responsive Applications
Applications with the following attributes will be deemed non-responsive and will not be reviewed:
- Studies of cellular function, physiological mechanisms, or gene/protein structures or relationships
- Drug development research, including natural substances and dietary supplements research
- Toxicology studies
- Pharmacological interventions
- Studies involving animal models
- Studies on symptoms, symptom management, self-management, or individual health behaviors without consideration of context, i.e., meaningful incorporation of NINR research lenses in the conceptual underpinnings of the study
For more information, please see the opportunity webpage.