Apply for Funding to Analyze and Write About Data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders!
The National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL) research team, with support from the John Templeton Foundation, invites proposals from researchers who wish to apply for $2,000 honoraria to prepare a conference presentation and write an article based on NSRL data.
The National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL) is a new survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,600 clergy from across the religious spectrum. Conducted in 2019-2020, the NSRL contains a wealth of information about congregations’ religious leaders and provides a rich new resource for answering a wide range of questions about clergy who serve congregations. There are questions about respondents’ jobs and careers, including job satisfaction; religious beliefs and practices; views about and practices related to mental health; attitudes and practices related to end-of-life issues; community involvement; political attitudes and practices; engagement with the larger religious world; knowledge of and attitudes about science, and how science informs their work; primary information sources; mental and physical health; and demographic characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, age, education, birthplace, marital status, and income.
Proposals should include:
- The proposer’s name, position, institutional affiliation, and email address.
- A project description of no more than 1,500 words (not including references) that states the research question(s) that will be investigated, identifies the NSRL variables that will be used, and articulates how answering the research question(s) will contribute significantly to knowledge on the proposed subject.
- A statement of no more than 200 words describing the knowledge, experience, and skills that position the proposer to successfully complete the proposed work.
- The conference and journal the researcher is targeting for this work.
- The proposer’s CV.
Researchers should closely review the NSRL codebook and the article that describes the NSRL sample and methods before developing a proposal.
Researchers at all career stages, including doctoral students, are welcome to apply. Co-authored proposals are welcome. If a co-authored proposal is selected, the honorarium will be divided evenly among the co-authors.
Proposals will be assessed based on the potential significance of the work proposed, the likelihood of resulting in a high-visibility publication, and with an eye to avoiding redundancy. That is, if we receive several proposals on the same subject, using the same NSRL variables, only the author of the strongest proposal on that subject is likely to receive an award. Honorarium decisions will be made by 15 November 2022. We anticipate making 8-10 awards.
Awardees will receive access to the NSRL dataset several months before it is publicly released. They will be expected to present their paper at a conference in 2023 and submit it for peer review at a scholarly journal before 31 December 2023.
Proposals should be emailed to nsrlstaff@duke.edu by 5 pm EDT on Monday, October 3, 2022. Please email two PDFs at the same time: (1) a document containing items (1)-(4) listed above and named YOURNAME_NSRL Proposal.pdf, and (2) a document containing the proposer’s CV and named YOURNAME_CV.pdf.
Questions about this opportunity may be directed to Mark Chaves, Anne Firor Scott Distinguished Professor of Sociology and NSRL Director, Duke University, mac58@duke.edu.
