RESEARCH PROCESS FLOW CHART FOR SOCIAL CARE
5 FIND SOME FUNDING
You may be doing your study within existing resources, but research is an expensive activity, requiring considerable expertise, time and skill.
Costs for which you may seek funding
These are the sorts of items for which you may seek funding:
- Salaries of researchers, interviewers and support staff, including their pensions and national insurance
- Equipment, such as computers, tape recorders and so on
- Travel and subsistence
- Payments to participants
- Office costs such as stationery, photocopying, phone, postage
- Access to libraries and the internet
- Preparation and dissemination of reports
Where to look for funding
Sources of funding for social care research are few compared with health research and the sums available are much smaller, as work carried out at SCIE has shown. The following organisations are significant funders of social care research.
- Department for Education and Skills (DfES)
- Department of Health (DH)
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)
- Leverhulme Trust
- Nuffield Foundation
There are several sources of information and advice on funding for social care research.
- RDFunding is a database of organisations which fund health and social care research
- The General Social Care Council provides bursaries to social work students
Paying participants
If you are involving service users or their relatives in your research you should think about whether they should be paid. This may take the form of paying expenses, giving a standard fee or making some other acknowledgement of their contribution. There can be difficulties in paying service users to be involved in research, especially for those receiving state benefits.
- More guidance is published by INVOLVE.
t is important to cost for the involvement of service users in development and management of the study, as well as disseminating results to them after it has finished.
Will you need to pay for other assistance on the project? If so, you will need to know about salary scales, and you must not forget to add in the correct amounts for national insurance and pension contributions.
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