Rewarding Collaborations on Federal Grants
WCW’s collaboration with Lynch Research Associates
LRA first began working with WCW in 2017, when Dr. Jennifer Grossman, a faculty member at WCW, had a successfully funded federal grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that required the help of a lead statistician with expertise in psychometric testing and longitudinal statistical modeling.
Federal grants are among the most difficult grants to obtain. Only the top researchers and experts in their fields receive them. We’re honored that the faculty members at WCW have placed their trust in Lynch Research Associates. This speaks to our strength as methodologists and statisticians.
For Dr. Grossman’s project, Lynch Research Associates performed all the statistical modeling that was required and helped the faculty generate a series of peer-reviewed publications.
Since then, we’ve collaborated with other WCW faculty, helping them write winning federal and foundation grant proposals, serving as the lead methodologist on funded grants, and producing numerous peer-reviewed publications. This work has been cited in other academic publications and picked up by the popular media.
Dr. Grossman says, “As a principal investigator on numerous federally funded projects, I have partnered with Lynch Research Associates on grants and journal submissions for many years because they are professional, highly responsive, and bring both detailed and big-picture approaches to their work.”
Below are a few examples of the work that we’ve helped WCW faculty produce.
Peer-reviewed articles:
Appearances in popular media:
Combining a Quantitative and Qualitative Approach to a Foundation’s Impressive Work
Our Approach
Developing a Two-Part Study for Better Insights
The AVDF enlisted us to research the answers to the above questions. To accomplish this, we developed a two-part study.
- PHASE 1
We designed a qualitative interview process in which the LRA team conducted hour-long interviews with six faculty members who teach Good Life courses and six of their students. - PHASE 2
Currently underway, we’re using insights gained from the qualitative study to create a survey to be administered to Good Life students and faculty nationwide.
Our founder, Alicia Lynch, explains the rationale behind this approach: “The process of first conducting a qualitative study and then using insights from the qualitative study to design a quantitative study is a well-regarded approach to fields such as this that are newly emerging.”
Results
Rich Data, Unexpected Insights
The twelve hours of interview data that we collected provided incredibly rich data and unexpected insights into the experiences of faculty and students who have engaged in Good Life courses.
Though faculty reported using a wide variety of theoretical approaches and selected texts, several key themes emerged suggesting that Good Life courses, while taught from various perspectives across a range of universities, possess common threads both in their pedagogical approaches and in students’ lived experiences.
The insights generated from the qualitative report provided a strong foundation for building a quantitative study.
LRA is currently recruiting Good Life faculty across the country to participate in a pre-post study (also known as a before-and-after study) in which students enrolled in Good Life courses in the Fall of 2022 will complete a survey before completing a Good Life course and after they’ve completed the course.
The quantitative study will allow us to reach a broader range of students and faculty. It will also deepen our understanding of what Good Life courses look like across the country, who is enrolling in these courses, and what pedagogical approaches may be most effective for helping students explore what it means to live a “Good Life” and (ultimately) how to adapt their attitudes and behaviors so that they can develop a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in life.
Stay tuned for the results of the quantitative study, which are expected to be available in the Spring of 2023.
Your data has a story. We help tell it.
To date, we’ve helped Commonwealth with the following:
We’ve worked with Commonwealth through the challenges of having dense amounts of data, but needing to choose the select data points that will have the most impact. Many of our collaborations involve helping Commonwealth discover the true story that the data is telling.
Click the links below to learn more about some of our collaborations with Commonwealth:
- Emerging Technology for All: Conversational AI’s Pivotal Role in Improving Financial Security and Opportunity
- Perceptions of Financial Insecurity in America: A National Survey of Working People in the United States
- Collective Savings: The Power of Social Support in Building Emergency Savings
- Prize-Linked Savings in Credit Unions: 2019
Rewarding work with trusted partners
Our ongoing collaborations with Commonwealth serve as an excellent example of how we develop long-term relationships with many of our clients. It’s an honor to work with organizations that have such a profound impact on the world—and we are grateful that they trust us with their research projects.
“LRA was a pleasure to work with and played an essential role in developing our research questions and data sets into meaningful insights to inform our next phase of human-centered product development.”
