Dr. Buller's
Laboratory
What's it
like to be a communication researcher with your own laboratory?
Not many people in the discipline can answer that question, but
David Buller, an associate professor of communication at the University
of Arizona, can.
Buller
was recently notified that he and associates Michael Burgoon, John Hall,
and Mary Buller will be receiving an estimated $1.1 million from the
National Cancer Institute to design a curriculum and other materials to
persuade elementary school students and their parents to adopt skin
cancer prevention methods for the entire family. The researchers will spend four years evaluating a variety of
potential message elements, and several of those experiments should have
significance for the development of persuasion theory.
"I
have always had a preference for theoretically driven research, but
several of my funded projects read more like evaluations of
programs," said Buller. "I
think as a field it may be easier to obtain money to study practical
problems of communication than to study purely theoretical ideas."
Building
on previous smaller scale work is what has led to Buller's success.
The NCI skin cancer prevention project came from a series of
studies funded by the Arizona Cancer Center.
"This grant is a good example of how some states have
funding agencies that will fund small projects," Buller said.
"This is especially good for getting pilot data and
establishing a track record of prior studies and prior grant reports.
It is most difficult to get the first extramural grant, because
granting agencies don't like uncertainty."
Buller's
lab also has two other funded projects in progress.
A second large grant from the National Cancer Institute is
titled, "5 A Day: Healthier Eating for the Overlooked Worker
Project," and is supported through a partnership between NCI and
the produce industry. Buller
and colleagues from the Departments of Communication, Sociology, Family
and Community Medicine, and Nursing are targeting blue collar workers to
learn about healthy eating practices.
They are comparing the effectiveness of the program they designed
to traditional company-based wellness programs.
A total of nine proposals were funded nationally for this
project, and Vicki Freimuth, a speech communication professor at the
University of Maryland, College Park, is part of another team whose
proposal was funded. Both
Buller and Freimuth commented that participation on interdisciplinary
teams is essential to the credibility of such a large-scale project.
The
other project focused on deception as interpersonal communication and
was funded by the U.S. Army Research Institutes' Office of Research and
Advanced Concepts. Buller
and co-Principal Investigator Judee Burgoon found the announcement of
this program through reading their university grant office's bulletin
and then made contact with a program officer to determine if what they
wanted to do would be within the guidelines of the request for
applications. The grant
that resulted funded a series of five experiments on how familiarity
with an individual's normal behavior, familiarity with deception cues,
and relational familiarity affected individuals' abilities to recognize
various forms of deception. Results
of this work is just beginning to be published in the discipline's
journals.
How
does he juggle all these projects at once?
"That's the million-dollar question," Buller replied.
The deception project is staffed by six Department of
Communication graduate students, a model Buller became acquainted with
while a student at Michigan State University, while the cancer grants
are staffed more by full-time and part-time professionals working in
offices located off-campus in both Tucson and Phoenix (Buller's spouse,
Mary, plays a major role in managing these off-campus sites).
Buller himself receives no reduction in department teaching or
other duties, and he contends that these projects generally take up the
time he'd normally devote to research.
But, doing funded research involves paperwork, periodic reports
to granting agencies, conference calls, and additional presentations.
"It comes with the territory, and you will hear no loud
complaints from me," Buller remarked.
When
asked how communication researchers should be crafting proposals, Buller
offered a number of suggestions:
 |
Follow
all directions. Make it
look good. Don't get
thrown out because you didn't have the right style or don't provide
the right documents. |
|
Don't
assume that reviewers will fill in blanks in proposals or understand
past research completely. Strive
for simplicity. |
|
Revise
proposals whenever possible and resubmit them.
Always assume that if a reviewer did not understand something
in your proposal it was your fault, and make it better when you
revise. |
|
Emphasize
your own past research relevant to the proposed project in
putting your rationale together. |
|
Get
letters of commitment or support from relevant organizations. |
|
If
the funding organization allows it, tell them that you will hire a
consultant, an expert faculty member from another institution, to
advise you on some important aspect of your project.
This technique builds reviewer confidence that you will be
able to handle problems that come up in the process. |
|
Propose
a study that will result in a product of use to the funding agency.
Frame your proposal in terms of how the results will help
them in their mission, rather than how they will help you. |
|
Budget
projects realistically. Make
sure you have enough staff support to do the project appropriately,
enough equipment and supplies.
Fund a portion of your own salary.
The touchiest areas are typically clerical support (which
many agencies think universities should provide as part of overhead
costs) and travel. Realize
that proposal budgets often get cut to fit with funding limitations
and also that it is nearly impossible to add money to a budget once
it is approved. |
