In or Out of Sync: Federal Funding and Research in Early Childhood

Abstract

Understanding the relation between federal investment and research has implications for promoting science production in early childhood, a rapidly expanding area in education research and policy. Federally funded research has shaped fundamental issues in early childhood, yet few studies have systematically examined the relation between federal investment and publication output. Our study applies topic modeling and regression analyses on a text corpus of 15,608 publication and grant abstracts in early childhood education to distill the most prominent topics, and the relationship between grant funding and later publications within these topics. We find that grants topics focused on health and early intervention, while publications covered a wider interdisciplinary range. A topic’s prevalence in grants, as a proxy of federal investment, was positively associated with its prevalence in publications in the following year. The study illustrates the affordances of textual analyses and contributes insights about how federal investment motivates scholarly production.