Latest Large Grant Announcement

Main Category: Public Health
Also Included In: Mental Health
Article Date: 21 Jul 2008 - 0:00 PDT

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The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has announcesd the outcome from its third annual large grants competition. The large grant scheme provides funding for experienced researchers requiring longer term funding or extended support for research or research infrastructure. All four grants address important social and economic issues both within the UK and globally.

• Business, Taxation and Welfare - Taxation can have large knock on effects on the choices that a business can make including higher product price, lower wages and how a business may invest. This project led by Professor Michael Devereux from Oxford University will further investigate how governments currently manage business taxation and explore how governments in the future can better design and manage business taxes. The project has been awarded c. £2.2 million over four years.
  
  
• Health, Econometrics and Data Group - With funding of c. £1.3 million over four years the Health, Econometrics and Data Group will focus on analysing health, health-related behaviour and health care. The result of the research aims to better inform health related policy on areas such as health inequality and ways to evaluate public health initiatives. It will also compare the performance of health care systems on an international level. Dr Nigel Rice at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York, will lead a team of five academics.
  
  
• Developing the Centre for Time Use Research - Time is a valuable commodity to society and the time use information, collected through surveys and the collection of detailed diaries potentially provides a comprehensive view of the conduct of daily life. Large Grant funding of c £1.9m over the next 5 years will enable the Centre for Time Use Research, led by Professor Jonathan Gershuny at the University of Oxford, to significantly expand and enhance the time use data available for researchers. Allowing more comprehensive analysis of how people from across 76 countries use their time; exploring how this has changed over time, if people's use of time is based on class, life stages or gender and how time use is affected by government policy.
  
  
• Emotion Regulation of Others and Self - Sitting in a long traffic jam on a Friday afternoon and feeling stressed out most people would turn on the radio or wind down the window, this is a common technique that can be described as emotional regulation. Dr Peter Totterdell at University of Sheffield will lead the nine strong team of academics studying; Emotion Regulation of Others and Self: A Collaborative Research Network. The project aims to investigate the mental and behavioural process of emotional regulation. When emotional regulation does not work it may lead to many mental health problems such as gambling alcohol and drug abused and even bipolar disorder. Understanding how people control their emotions can have great advantages to the individual well-being and performance of society. The project has been awarded c. £2.million over four years.

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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1.The Large Grants scheme to provide for experienced researchers requiring longer term or extended support for research groups, inter-institutional research networks, linked-project programmes, medium-to-large surveys, other infrastructure or methodological developments, or any related larger-scale projects where funding above the standard research grant of £1.5 million, and up to £5 million at 100% in full economic costs is required. This scheme is an open competition, and there is no restriction on what research or research facility may be applied for, as long as it makes a major contribution to the UK social science research base. It is also likely that successful applications will make a significant contribution to social science at the global level, and the extent of that potential contribution will have a significant effect upon the likelihood of success.

2.The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It supports independent, high quality research which impacts on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC's planned total expenditure in 2008/09 is £203 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and research policy institutes. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/

3.ESRC Society Today offers free access to a broad range of social science research and presents it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and saves users valuable time. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research and key online resources such as the Social Science Information Gateway and the UK Data Archive, non-ESRC resources are included, for example the Office for National Statistics. The portal provides access to early findings and research summaries, as well as full texts and original datasets through integrated search facilities. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/

Source: Danielle Moore
Economic & Social Research Council