Applying for Grant Funding for Research on Families, Technology, & COVID-19

We are grateful that we have received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in our study of how families are using technology to navigate COVID-19. We applied for and were awarded a grant through the NSF RAPID program, which is intended for quick review on emerging and time-sensitive. In this post, I will provide the backstory for how this grant funding happened.

As a researcher who studies family use of technologies who was also directly observing the role technology was having in my own family, I knew immediately that technology was going to be having a crucial role in how families navigate COVID-19 and social distancing, and yet, there were also many challenges. For example, we were struggling with “account overload” as our school’s teachers all used different technologies with different logins and passwords, and watching my 4 year old try to navigate how to mute and unmute in Google Hangouts with all his classmates when most had never even used a mouse before was painful to say the least. If a family that has two PhDs in Computer Science, one of whom studies family technologies for a living, was struggling, then we knew that families with a lot less privilege would be running into many issues too, and thus I wanted to study this to find out these issues and make it better.

I had received information from the University of Washington’s Office of Research about funding available through the NSF RAPID mechanism, and I opened up a Slack thread with 3 other fantastic researchers with whom I had already collaborated with on family technology studies (Alexis Hiniker, Sean Munson, and Jason Yip, the other co-PIs on the grant) to see if they wanted to submit a grant. I also talked to a few of my PhD students who were interested in families and technologies to see if this was something they would be interested in studying. One student, Rebecca Michelson, had told me that she felt that working on a COVID-19 related research study would be a good coping strategy, as she felt she would be responsive to the pandemic. That sealed the deal for me that this was something we should pursue.

We quickly drafted a 2-page draft of an idea, which I emailed to a program officer at NSF’s Cyber-Human Systems program under the Computing (CISE) directorate, who typically funds research on human-computer interaction. He said it was a good fit for the program, but that the sooner we could put an application, the better. Thus began the fastest grant application I’d ever put together.

Normally grant applications take many weeks and months of planning and preparation, with a ton of internal deadlines before it finally gets submitted. We basically went from that 2-page draft statement to a submitted proposal about 48 hours after receiving that email, thanks to the tireless work of the research team, the excellent grant support staff in my department at UW, and UW’s Office of Research. We also rapidly put in our application for our human subjects ethics review, which was expedited due to it being about COVID-19 related research. I’m pretty sure the grant proposal was written entirely on adrenaline!

We received word from the program officer that we were likely to be funded a few weeks after our submission, but it took about another month for the funding to be finalized and be officially awarded. We knew we had to start the research in the meantime though, as we knew that we needed to capture families’ experiences while school was still in session. Thus, we took a leap of faith and began the study before the grant funding was finalized.

One of the requirements of funding through this mechanism is that our research had to be directly responsive to helping stakeholders with coping with COVID-19. For those of you who are less familiar with scientific research, while the NSF often evaluates research on their potential for broader impacts, those impacts can be further out. Thus, it was new for us to have to think about how we could design a study that would have direct and immediate benefits for families. This helped us plan out the Asynchronous Remote Communities protocol such that we can use it to build community amongst the families in our study and allow for reflection, which we had found in prior studies was a benefit to the participants. It’s also the reason we developed this blog and our social media accounts as a mechanism for sharing out findings immediately. This is a new experience for us, so we appreciate you following along with us, and let us know if you have questions you’d like to see us answer!

One great thing about NSF is that they make public every award that is granted. Soon after our award was officially granted, we were contacted by some other researchers who had also been awarded RAPID grants for similar studies on families, technology, and COVID-19, but were looking at it from different perspectives using different methods. We are planning on organizing a virtual discussion this summer to share some of our ideas and findings. If you’re also working on research in this space, we would love to connect with you, learn from you, and help cross-promote your research as well.

Thanks again to the National Science Foundation for making this research possible, and many other important scientific endeavors it funds. We’re also grateful for our program officer, Andruid Kerne, for guiding us through this process and helping us make connections to other researchers studying COVID-19.

For more information on our research as it progresses, you can follow along with our research team on Medium and Twitter.