My second grant

Steve Simon

2006-07-26

I’m in the final stretch of writing a grant to submit to the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute.

I am already thinking “what is my next step?” One possibility would be to run a small study that will provide hard numbers to support a commonly expressed belief that most research studies fall behind schedule and fail to get anything close to the targeted sample sizes. I would take the original grant or IRB applications as well as the annual reports and final reports and abstract information about the original sample size and planned completion date, and how that changed over time, and what the final sample size and completion date are. I would also look to see if certain types of studies were more likely to experience problems than other types of studies. Finally, I’d like to do a qualitative data analysis of the “excuses” that people give in their reports when the actual conduct of the research fails to match their initial projections.