Funding Programmes for Internationally Mobile Postdocs: Perceived Impacts on Individuals, Institutions and Society. – An exploratory study

This study explored the range of potential impacts of funded long-term research stays perceived by internationally mobile postdocs and their hosts at various levels as broadly as possible, and by using multiple methods. However, if the question was to what extent the perceived impacts were achieved and caused by the funding programme, other methods would need to be applied. One could use, for example, quasi-experiments (e.g. within-group designs) and modern data technology (e.g. propensity score matching) to establish a causal relationship between funding and observed impacts.

The presented study outlines a few questions, answers to which can facilitate a future programme design, implementation and subsequent evaluation. At what levels would the funding organisation like to pursue objectives within a funding programme? Should the focus be just on the individual level, arguing, that the individual funding is what is provided? Or, should the focus remain on the individual level but spill-over effects (to the working group, host institution and society) should be considered as well? Or, does the funding organisation want to pursue goals at the individual, working group, institutional and societal level (research system and other aspects of societal life)? Are there overarching objectives that are not specific to a programme or initiative, but to which they contribute together? 

After the above-mentioned questions have been answered, the suggestion for the funding organisation would be to design or modify programming documents describing the pursued objectives in a narrative way and develop an intervention logic for each funding programme, such as those presented in our research report. For each level, where results would be expected (from the individual to society), the report suggests disentangling the logical chain of changes into outputs, outcomes, programme-specific impacts and overarching impacts. As far as indicators are concerned, ideally, their target values would be set and they would have a reference to baseline values.

Additional questions that our study would like to outline, are related to internationalisation@home, socio-economic and socio-political impacts and gender parity: Could research stays of international mobile postdocs coming to a host country for a research stay be used more strongly in future for the internationalisation of universities@home? Should socio-economic and socio-political impacts be explicit goals of funding in the future? Is there a need for a more proactive search for highly qualified women among applicants, reviewers and hosts?