Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
This thesis studies the 1998-2003 doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget to evaluate how assertions about the impact of research investments compare with actual health and research outcomes. Stakeholders in the doubling noted a variety of outcomes intended to result from the effort. Using public value mapping (Bozeman…
This thesis studies the 1998-2003 doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget to evaluate how assertions about the impact of research investments compare with actual health and research outcomes. Stakeholders in the doubling noted a variety of outcomes intended to result from the effort. Using public value mapping (Bozeman and Sarewitz, 2005), I have compared stakeholders' stated intentions of what the doubling ought to achieve with the health and research outcomes actually produced. In applying public value mapping, I first conducted interviews and reviewed press releases, Congressional record, news, and other data from the doubling period. Six public values were commonly represented in this data: (1) improving health outcomes (2) reducing the cost of healthcare (3) producing application-relevant knowledge (4) building biosecurity and biodefense capabilities (5) developing the research enterprise (6) economic growth I then inferred causal logic chains by which increasing funding could lead to achievement of the public values and identified four investment intermediaries through which funding would pass in advancing public values. Finally, using proxies, I evaluated if the public values had advanced in a way directly attributable to funding increases. This analysis identified (5) as achieved. (1), (3), (4), and (6) were indeterminate in one of the two components necessary for evaluating public value achievement: either no clear advancement or no direct link between outcomes and doubling investments. (2) was a failure due to the increase in healthcare costs throughout and following the doubling period. These results indicate that complex societal outcomes used to justify incremental research investments are challenging to causally attribute to those same investments, and thus uncertain premises on which to base policy.
