NIH agencies are seeking more behavioral funding

Some funding agencies are planning new behavioral and social science agendas.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

Although more than half of the 21 insti-tutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) traditionally spend less than 10 percent of their budgets on behavioral and social sciences research, some that invest the least are moving aggressively to improve their track record.

According to Norman B. Anderson, PhD, director of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), institutes such as the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)--which spend less than 4 percent of their budgets on this type of research--are working to develop behavioral and social science research agendas.

Once they do, their support of the behavioral and social sciences should rise, says Anderson. But getting a bigger slice of the NIH pie for these sciences won't just be an issue of increased interest by the institutes, he adds. It will also require psychologists and other behavioral and social science researchers to begin applying their expertise to issues important to many of the disease-oriented institutes.

"The low funding numbers reflect both the institutes' lack of encouragement of certain fields and also the number of proposals that come in from those fields," says Anderson. If few applications come in, an institute will have little incentive to change its funding tactics.

In fact, the dollar amounts spent by most institutes on the social and behavioral sciences have increased steadily over the past several years as the overall NIH budget has increased. But the percentage each institute spends on these sciences has remained static, according to numbers collected by the NIH Office of Financial Management. That's because, as NIH's budget increases, all branches of science benefit equally.

"Although the NIH budget has seen significant increases, all boats rise at approximately the same rate," says Anderson. "For the behavioral and social sciences to have a bigger chunk of the money, other boats would have to rise more slowly."

But OBSSR is certainly trying to get its boat to rise faster--hoping eventually to secure more than 10 percent of every institute's budget for the behavioral and social sciences. To that end, Anderson and his staff are taking a two-pronged approach, working directly with institutes to encourage more funding opportunities and communicating with researchers the need to present ideas to institutes that traditionally have not supported the behavioral and social sciences.

Several of what APA and other organizations have called the "wasteland" institutes--those that spend less than 5 percent of their budgets on the behavioral and social sciences--are actively soliciting proposals from psychologists and other behavioral and social science researchers.

For example: