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The micropolitics of qualitative health research funding
Jeanne Daly
Abstract
When qualitative researchers get together and talk about research funding their talk often turns to accounts of the unacceptable ways in which their research proposals were disposed of by health research funding bodies. Indeed, part of the reason for establishing this journal was a profound concern about the hostile research environment faced by social science researchers, but especially those using qualitative methods (Daly and Willis, 1990). We argued for the importance of recognising the diversity of social science research, emphasising the potential contribution of the social sciences to health research. Our focus was on rational persuasion, but our discussion only skirted around issues regarding the research funding process.
According to Derek Colquhoun (1996: 33) the research funding process is a "singularly secret, almost covert, activity, the conventional wisdom of which is only available to experienced and senior researchers." Colquhoun suggests that anyone who makes public what is normally hidden will become an outsider to this exclusive group. Indeed, as Sandy Gifford and Simon Chapman found when they attempted to survey the success rate of qualitative research proposals submitted to the National Health and Medical Research Council, the whole process is shrouded in confidentiality so that it is very difficult even to identify proposals using qualitative methods. Their best estimate was only for the years 1994 and 1995; in these two years one qualitative proposal was funded out of 20 submitted (personal communication).
As Allan Kellehear tells us in his article in this volume, research is not a neutral act. It carries social and political assumptions about the nature of research and the nature of the problems worth researching. The allocation of funding to health research is clearly the subject of political debate and public inquiry. In contrast, the allocation of funding to individual research proposals occurs in closed sessions in which panels of accredited `experts' assess, sometimes with interview, the proposals which are submitted to them. Thus the actual decision-making processes of health research funding are hidden from view. The assumption is, apparently, that these `experts' will make their judgments in an objective and scientific manner, free from political considerations. Social scientists view such assumptions with a dubious eye. It merely serves to alert us further to what I shall call the micropolitical context of research funding.
References
Colquhoun. D. (1996) 'Moving beyond biomedical
research in health education', in D. Colquhoun & A.
Kellehear (eds) Health Research in Practice, volume 2,
Chapman and Hall, London.
Daly. J. and Willis, E. (1990) The Social Sciences and
Health Research, Public Health Association, Canberra.
Daly, J, Kellehear, A. & Gliksman, M, (1997) The Public
Health Researcher. A methodological guide, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne.
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