During the Summer School, students have an opportunity to discuss research proposals on the role of culture in psychology. The resulting proposals could be collaborative or individual. The following information is required:

1) Title of project

2) What is the issue you would like to explore and where would you like to study it? (1-2 paragraphs)

3) What are your ideas concerning how you would design your project? (1-2 paragraphs)

4) How does your project relate to what you learned in the IACCP Summer School? (1-2 paragraphs)

5) Who would be your mentor? (Select either someone at your home university or one of the summer school instructors.)

6) itemized budget, with the maximum budget of $1500.

The proposals are due on the last day of the conference.

It is expected that the Award recipients present their research findings at the next IACCP Congress or the Regional Conference. Reimbursement for travel and conference expenses would be provided at that time.

The adjudicating committee consists of C&P School instructors, Saba Safdar, as the Chair of C&P School committee, and one more member of the C&P committee.

• SG1 - Connection and Networking: small group meetings (can include travel costs) with various purposes:
• Connecting practice and theory (e.g., working with practitioners for evidence-based interventions on local/regional/national/international levels; connecting local communities of researchers with NGOs and policy makers)
• Academic meetings, within or across regions. (Note. For all meetings funded by the grant, at least 30% of attendees must be IACCP members. Alternately, the project budget must include coverage of IACCP membership fees for new members).
• SG2 - Awareness: activities that spread interest and awareness of cross-cultural psychology, such as:
• Online informal dissemination or community building, e.g., blogs.
• Activities supporting knowledge transfer to the community.
• Other activities that encourage and highlight the importance of cross-cultural psychology topics.
• SG3 - Research capacity and dissemination funding, for example,
• Software licenses, translation and language editing, short-term small scale data collection (to be considered as seed funding / capacity-building for a clearly specified and planned project). Note that research projects must be of high quality and should additionally support awareness building (per SG2) and/or networking (per SG1) and/or capacity building (per SG4).
• SG4 - Education: Workshop organization (e.g., inviting experts to give publication, collaborative grant writing, methods or stats workshops to build skills, language workshops/training). The project budget can include travel costs, honoraria for Resource Persons etc.

Grants will cover costs of up to 1000 US dollars.

Preference will be given to projects that involve a range of regions, and those that benefit participants in economically developing countries (World Bank classification of low to upper-middle income economies: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519).

We strongly encourage principal applicant(s) to be based outside of North American, European, and prototypically Western contexts (including Australia, New Zealand). This means that priority will be given to applications that are led by and focus on scholars from underrepresented areas. Other applications will be considered after that. Please note that this preference is enacted based on the main applicants’ institutional affiliation and the region they are based in, and not individual background.

Main Applicants / Organizers who are IACCP members are preferred. If you or members of your team are currently not members, it is possible to include funding for membership in your application.

To apply, you will need to prepare a project proposal and upload it together with your CV and CVs of all your co-applicants. Please make sure your CVs include information presenting your/your teams’ relevant competence to execute the project.

The project proposal should have the following sections
- Main objective (max 250 words)
- Detailed plan (max 1000 words)
- Itemized Budget (max $1000 USD)
- Impact plan (max 500 words)

Review Criteria

The following criteria will be applied to the proposals, and will be evaluated on a 1-10 rating scale by the committee members.

Relevance:

1. The project fits well into and advances the goals of the proposed SG theme (or multiple themes).
2. The project is highly relevant to important issues in cross-cultural psychology.
3. The project objectives, implementation steps, and impact plan are clearly stated
4. The project involves meaningful cross-regional collaboration and/or benefits economically developing regions.
5. The field would miss something if the proposed project were not conducted.
6. Without the SPARK grant the project would not be possible to be realized.

Feasibility:

1. Competence of team to execute the project.
2. Appropriateness of itemized budget plan.
3. Realistic time plan.

Review Process

The proposal will be reviewed by at least two members of the SG committee. The committee is set up by the IACCP Executive Committee. In case that the committee does not have relevant academic and/or regional expertise to review the proposals, an IACCP regional representative or another EC member will be invited to review. Other IACCP members could be asked to advise. In such cases, at least one committee member will review a proposal to ensure continuity of standards. The final decision to award the proposal rests with the SG committee.

Reviewers need to state any conflict of interest at the beginning of their review. If there is a conflict of interest, committee members will recuse themselves from reviewing a proposal. The proposals will not be blinded as personal information is relevant to assessment.

Award Allocation

The SG committee will have a limited amount of funding available, and will evaluate proposals submitted by April 30, 2026. The applicants will be informed about the SG committee decision on June 30, 2026.

The committee will meet to discuss the proposals and reviews, and will make a decision taking into consideration the scoring and reviewer comments.

The committee provides feedback when not funding proposals, which is meant to clarify the decision, and aims at assisting the applicants in eventually realizing their proposal. We encourage resubmitting unsuccessful proposals in the next round(s), revising them based on the SG committee feedback received.

The Principal Applicant (PA) of a successful project will be contacted by IACCP’s treasurer (Jason Young) to arrange the transfer of funding.

• No overhead funding will be provided.
• No salary for the principal applicant/co-applicants will be provided.
• Potential conflicts of interest in spending funds, if any, should be declared and explained.
• It is necessary to provide documentation of expenses (e.g., receipts of purchases, documentation of attendance via screenshots or signatures) at the time of request for reimbursement, or (in the case of an advance) within a month after the project has been completed. If in doubt whether a type of documentation would be allowable, please contact the committee.
• If budget items change between submission and execution, please contact the committee to seek approval for the changed items.
• If necessary, an advance can be provided.
• When submitting the final documentation for all expenses ensure that it is complete and accompanied by a final report highlighting the proposed items/activities describe in the submission.

Please submit your proposal by completing this Qualtrics form.

- Submission of Final Report within 1 month of completion.

- Acknowledgement of the IACCP Spark Grant in related advertisements, posters, output  etc.

- We encourage grantees to collect feedback from the participants of their project/workshop/meeting.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our IACCP SPARK Grants Committee:

Shagufa Kapadia, shagufa@gmail.com (chair)

Emma Buchtel, emma.buchtel@gmail.com

Lusine Grigoryan, lusine.grigoryan@york.ac.uk

Michael Bender, m.bender@tilburguniversity.edu

Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka, natasza.kosakowska@ug.edu.pl

Purnima Singh, purnima125@hotmail.com

IAACP website: https://www.iaccp.org/about-us/research_grants/