Submitting a Proposal

Who is eligible to send a proposal?
Any faculty member or graduate student of any social science department anywhere in the world. We regret that we cannot provide opportunities to any other individuals and groups.

How do I send a proposal?
All proposals must be submitted through our website, www.experimentcentral.org. All listed authors or co-authors of a proposal must first fill out a TESS user profile by Clicking here and must satisfy the requirements listed above. After filling out a User Profile you will be sent a Username and Password which are required to submit a Proposal. If a user profile is not completed for each author, the proposal cannot be processed. Each proposal must also designate a contact author. The contact author must be listed first on all proposal documents and is the person to whom all official TESS corresponds will be held.

When can I submit a proposal?
TESS begins accepting proposals in January of 2002 and will review them on a continuous basis over the next four years. Our initial funding arrangement allows TESS to run for approximately four years.

What information must my proposal include?
The proposal must include

• A thorough description of the study design.
• An explanation of how the study will make a valuable contribution to science and society.
• An explanation of how people in other scientific disciplines will benefit from this study.
• A request for a particular number of respondent-minutes with justification.
• An appendix with actual questions and description of stimuli.

Why are there limits on what I can ask for?
TESS provides a free service to investigators whose proposals are endorsed by the external reviewers, relevant Associate PI's and can meet standard human subjects requirements without placing an extraordinary burden on TESS resources.

Indeed, that TESS is a collective endeavor implies that there are strict limits on what services we can provide to any one investigator.

The time and resource limits stated herein are real. Proposals are more likely to succeed, both in the review process and then once out in the field, if these limits are strictly interpreted.

How much time can I have?
You can ask for approximately 2000 respondent-minutes (calculated as the number of respondents times the average number of minutes per interview) on the TESS telephone instrument or 8000 respondent-questions on the TESS Internet instrument. The telephone time limit includes questions and answers. If your telephone proposal is provisionally accepted, we will pretest the experiment to ensure that it can be administered in the time allotted. If the experiment cannot fit within the time allotted, it must be revised. For more on this issue, read "What to do if your proposal is provisionally accepted".

Your time does not include the demographic and socioeconomic data that we will collect for all investigators. For both telephone and Internet experiments, we solicit gender, age, race, marital status, education, current employment status, personal income, and state of residence. Click here for more details on the standard demographic information that comes with every experiment. As the project evolves and our capacity allows, we may ask additional items. Please check back for revisions to this list before submitting a proposal.

What if I need more respondent-minutes than described above?
In a limited number of cases, TESS can provide additional respondent-minutes. Such requests, however, are required to pass higher review standards than regular proposals. If the request entails substantial additional costs on TESS, we will have to reject the proposal or ask the proposer to pay the additional cost. For more on this topic, read What do to if your proposal is provisionally accepted.

What if I want to sample a specific subpopulation?
In some cases, TESS can provide samples of subpopulations, depending upon the type of subpopulation sought and the expense involved in reaching an adequate number of people within such a group. If, however, the request entails substantial additional costs for TESS, we will have to reject the proposal or ask the proposer to pay the additional costs. For more on this topic, read What do to if your proposal is provisionally accepted.

How long can my proposal be?
Proposals are limited to five pages of text, plus up to two pages of references, up to two pages of tables, and plus the actual survey items to be included.
Text must be double-spaced and 12 point font. The total size of the electronic submission must not exceed 2 MB. Proposals that exceed these limits will be rejected by the system or returned by TESS staff.

What kinds of proposals are most likely to be successful?
We seek proposals that break new ground in the hypotheses they investigate, the procedures they employ, or both. For a list of publications that used the methods that TESS employs successfully, go here.

The key to TESS success is to win over reviewers in your chosen field. Ideally, your proposal should offer the potential for a clear scientific advance whose relevance expands beyond any one discipline.

Proposals that report trial runs of novel and focal ideas will be viewed as more credible.

We also think it desirable if the proposal is conducted in coordination with non-TESS data collection endeavors, such as traditional laboratory experiments or field work. We will give priority to investigators who can leverage TESS data with experimental data of their own. The potential for TESS to contribute to knowledge is enhanced when the data collection platforms are used to perform mode experiments. Whether the experiment compares phone to laboratory, internet to laboratory, or phone to internet is not as important to us as having experiments that clarify the qualities of any of these kinds of experimental data. Priority for use of the internet platform will be given to those studies that make use of unique capacities that the internet has to help us better understand the properties of experimental data considered generally.

My proposal is neither experimental nor quasi-experimental. Will TESS accept it?
No.

Can my proposal include both Internet and telephone components?
Yes. In fact, we favor proposals that are innovative methodologically as well as substantively - so we desire innovative mode comparisons. However, since such a proposal will use more resources, TESS requires that such proposals be of an extraordinarily high quality. Reviewers must not only find such a proposal to be of great substantive importance, they must also conclude that the mode comparison, in and of itself, will produce valuable and widely applicable knowledge. Note: Multi-mode proposals must stay within the page, file size, time, and case limits described above.