Building capacity for health research in higher education: Evaluating readiness for research and scholarship

This case study examines key components of research readiness for Doctoral Universities with High Research Activity (R2) through the lens of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) program. While there are long-standing systems in place for ranking research institutions based on grant expenditures, there is a need to establish methods to evaluate institutions’ readiness for externally funded competitive research. Drawing on literature across multiple disciplines and framed in alignment with the RCMI program goals, the authors developed a multidimensional instrument to examine research readiness centered on two primary domains (investigator and institutional readiness). The largest barriers to proposal development and conducting research/scholarship projects were managing time for competing expectations including scholarship, teaching, mentoring students, and service and recruiting skilled students who are prepared to assist the research process (respectively). Building research capacity requires research infrastructure, equitable distribution of institutional and grant resources, protected time for research, and focused areas research. Findings inform evaluation methods to assess research readiness, identify indicators and set benchmarks to measure changes in capacity and offer strategies for universities to enhance research capacity-building efforts and optimize institutions’ ability to conduct NIH mission relevant research.