Case Study 1 — Hernandez Builds a Research Budget That Matches Her Plan
Composite, for teaching. Figures are illustrative; verify current rates and caps with your institution and the agency.
The Situation
Dr. Hernandez must turn her approach (Chapter 9) and evaluation/analysis plan (Chapter 10) into a budget. Her instinct, like many researchers', is to treat the budget as paperwork for the grants office to handle. This chapter tells her the budget is part of the argument — and that building it herself, from the narrative, is the only way to make the two match.
Applying the Chapter
She builds personnel from effort. Her budget includes her own PI effort (a credible level — not the token 2% that would make a reviewer doubt she's really leading), a biostatistician co-investigator, a research coordinator to run recruitment and data collection, and percent-effort for a data manager. For each, she computes salary × effort + fringe at her institution's rate. The PI effort is the line she's most careful about, because a reviewer reads low PI effort as a leadership question.
She funds every activity in the approach. Her approach described recruiting [N] participants, measuring adherence and HbA1c, and running an automated text platform. So her budget funds: participant incentives (participant support costs, excluded from the indirect base), the HbA1c assays (supplies), the text-platform software, and the coordinator's time to recruit and measure. She checks the other direction too — no budget line lacks an activity. The evaluation/analysis plan's needs (the biostatistician, data management) are funded as personnel.
She handles indirect correctly. Her institution's negotiated rate applies to modified total direct costs — so she excludes the equipment and the participant-support costs from the base before applying the rate. Getting the base right (not applying the rate to the headline total) is exactly where she'd have erred if she'd guessed.
She builds multi-year with escalation. Salaries escalate 3%/year; the one-time software setup appears only in year 1; participant costs concentrate in the recruitment years. Each year is its own direct + indirect calculation, so the years aren't identical — and the year-by-year shape matches her timeline (Chapter 9).
The Trap She Avoids
Hernandez's first instinct was to let the grants office "do the budget" from her finished narrative. Building it herself, she discovers a budget hole: her analysis plan assumes a biostatistician's substantial involvement, but her draft budget gave the statistician only token effort — too little to do the work described. She fixes the effort to match the plan. Had she handed a finished narrative to the grants office, the mismatch might have survived to a reviewer, who would have asked how the sophisticated analysis would happen on so little statistical effort.
The Payoff
Hernandez's budget funds exactly what her narrative describes, computes personnel and indirect correctly, and tells the same story year by year as her timeline. A reviewer reading the budget alongside the approach sees one coherent project — and her credible PI effort signals real leadership. The budget reinforces the proposal rather than undermining it.
Discussion Questions
- Hernandez almost gave her statistician token effort despite an analysis-heavy plan. Why is this kind of budget-narrative mismatch especially common when the budget is built separately from the narrative?
- Why does she exclude equipment and participant-support costs from the indirect base, and what error would including them cause?
- How does the PI's own effort level function as a credibility signal beyond its dollar cost?