Understanding the Role of Non-federal Funding Match on the Effectiveness of a U.S. Strategy to Strengthen Academic Research Competitiveness Nationwide
type: CreativeWork
description: NSF EPSCoR is a policy intervention designed more than 40 years ago to help U.S. states increase their academic research competitiveness, measured principally at the time by their shares of federal research funding. This study used a comparative approach to focus on a cohort of eleven U.S. states that have participated in the NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) since the mid-1980s. Even though states have been required to demonstrate commitment to improving their academic research base by providing non-federal funding match to RII awards, there is little to no evidence about how or even whether their investments have contributed to success. This study fills a critical gap in knowledge about the role of non-federal match to NSF EPSCoR. It also addresses the absence of any significant previous attempts to directly understand causality. It does so by employing a realist evaluation framework. Rather than ask if nonfederal funding match worked, this study asks: What about non-federal matching to NSF EPSCoR worked for whom in what context and how? It required defining a clear measure of success outcome by which to judge. It involved collecting, creating, and prioritizing representative measures of state context and mechanisms of change (i.e., resources and reasoning). This was accomplished using surveys developed by the author to gather stakeholder input from EPSCoR practitioners who described how their state responded to the EPSCoR intervention. Survey results were used to also fill yet another knowledge gap - state-specific historical approaches to non-federal match. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) was used to identify conditions that interact and work together (conjunctural causation) to influence the outcome and describe multiple causal pathways (equifinality) to state success. It specifically allowed for testing for necessary and sufficient conditions and combinations of conditions. Only one condition tested here was found to be necessary for …
abstract: NSF EPSCoR is a policy intervention designed more than 40 years ago to help U.S. states increase their academic research competitiveness, measured principally at the time by their shares of federal research funding. This study used a comparative approach to focus on a cohort of eleven U.S. states that have participated in the NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) since the mid-1980s. Even though states have been required to demonstrate commitment to improving their academic research base by providing non-federal funding match to RII awards, there is little to no evidence about how or even whether their investments have contributed to success. This study fills a critical gap in knowledge about the role of non-federal match to NSF EPSCoR. It also addresses the absence of any significant previous attempts to directly understand causality. It does so by employing a realist evaluation framework. Rather than ask if nonfederal funding match worked, this study asks: What about non-federal matching to NSF EPSCoR worked for whom in what context and how? It required defining a clear measure of success outcome by which to judge. It involved collecting, creating, and prioritizing representative measures of state context and mechanisms of change (i.e., resources and reasoning). This was accomplished using surveys developed by the author to gather stakeholder input from EPSCoR practitioners who described how their state responded to the EPSCoR intervention. Survey results were used to also fill yet another knowledge gap - state-specific historical approaches to non-federal match. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) was used to identify conditions that interact and work together (conjunctural causation) to influence the outcome and describe multiple causal pathways (equifinality) to state success. It specifically allowed for testing for necessary and sufficient conditions and combinations of conditions. Only one condition tested here was found to be necessary for …
author: Schumaker, Rick
date published: 2025
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:01:01Z
provider: University of Westminster
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Westminster

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.34737/x67qq