Event Date
This is a year of transition for the NEA’s research program. Priorities that were expressed in a new five-year research agenda for the agency will be more fully reflected next year in the NEA’s FY 2024 Research Labs application guidelines. Meanwhile, the NEA Research Labs continue to build public knowledge about the arts and their contributions to individuals, communities, and society at large. Through NEA Research Labs, we will cultivate a series of transdisciplinary research partnerships, grounded in the social and behavioral sciences, to produce and report empirical insights about the arts for the benefit of arts practitioners, but also for non-arts sectors such as healthcare, education, and business or management. Institutions of higher education and/or nonprofit research and policy organizations may submit applications to be NEA Research Labs.
The NEA Research Labs program offers grant funding for longer-term research agendas. These agendas will include multiple research studies and activities that build and inform the field throughout the life of an NEA Research Lab. Applicants seeking grant funding for a specific and discrete research study should refer to the Research Grants in the Arts program guidelines.
Each NEA Research Lab will design a transdisciplinary research agenda, conduct project activities to execute that agenda, and prepare and disseminate reports and other products or services that will contribute substantively to a wider understanding of one of three areas of special interest to the NEA:
- The Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
- The Arts, Creativity, Cognition, and Learning
- The Arts, Health, and Social/Emotional Well-Being
NEA Research Labs serve as “hubs” or centers of excellence in the domain of interest. Each NEA Research Lab will develop a pipeline of projects or products, including a website, while conducting at least one major study. More detail on NEA Research Labs activities can be found in the “NEA Research Lab Project Activities” section.
The NEA is committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, and fostering mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all individuals and groups.
Projects and Research Methods
We encourage applications from diverse research fields (e.g., economics; psychology; education; sociology; medicine, health, and therapy; communications; business administration; urban and regional planning).
Applicants may propose NEA Research Lab projects that include research studies drawing from a variety of research design characteristics; these include but are not limited to, community-based participatory research, program evaluations, translational research, single-case and multi-case studies, complex surveys, bibliometrics and meta-analysis, and quasiexperimental or experimental study designs.
In recent years, the NEA has supported a growing cohort of studies that hypothesize a cause-effect relationship between the arts and key outcomes of interest (e.g., in health, education, or the economy). For projects seeking to demonstrate such impacts, experimental approaches (e.g., randomized controlled trials) are generally preferred. Where experimental approaches are not feasible for impact studies about the arts, then high-quality, quasi-experimental design studies offer an attractive alternative.
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