Interdisciplinary Study of the Virtue of Patience Launched with $4.71M Grant
“Patience enables us to take the right posture towards ourselves and others in our suffering and dependence.”
That’s Anne Jeffrey, associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University, and part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers on a project that recently received a $4.71 million grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. She adds:
As we consider how patience contributes to human flourishing today, the interdisciplinary approach will ground the philosophical and theological theoretical work in the lived experience of people who are no stranger to suffering, and who care well for others in their dependence and suffering.
The project is called “Patience in Adversity” and it “aims to discover the dynamic processes by which patience is enacted in daily life and across the life course, ways persons and situations interact to facilitate or inhibit patience, functions of patience, and mechanisms by which people cultivate patience as a virtue.”
It will include a longitudinal study that will collect data from different populations who face adverse circumstances. These include parents of adolescents with disabilities, Muslim-American parents of adolescents, and parents of adolescents in a diverse sample in Southern California.
Anne Jeffrey, Sarah Schnitker, and Kate Sweeny
The other principal investigators on the study are psychologists Sarah Schnitker (Baylor) and Kate Sweeny (UC Riverside).
The project will involve, among other thigs, paper prizes, a summer seminar for philosophers, and a fellows program for early career and graduate student researchers in psychology.
You can learn more about the project here.
That’s a *lot* of money! So much that it’s almost impossible to set aside concerns about the opportunity costs. Patience is great, but is it *this* good? I don’t mean to be a downer; I just had to give voice to a nagging doubt about whether this is a particularly good — let alone optimific — way to spend **5 million bucks**.
If you want to find out whether this particular project was worth the expenditure, you might have to wait a while.
I cannot speak about this grant specifically, but a typical grant in Europe of this size would pay the salaries of post docs and PhDs for three years (perhaps 2 post docs and 1 PhD). There would also be some money to cover conference travel, and to organize workshops and conferences. But, by far, the greatest expense would be the salaries. So grants like this (at least in Europe) create employment opportunities.
Hi all, Anne here. Most of this money will go towards a) a program that will help grad students and early career folks who are not already part of the network of the psychologists to get training and then offer seed money for them to do their own research, b) postdocs, graduate assistants, investigators’ research time, and c) participant costs, which goes directly to the parents of adolescents with disabilities, parents of Muslim American adolescents, and parents of adolescents a diverse population in California. We hope the research, too, will benefit these populations and their children. Hope that is helpful- and yes, we may have to wait 🙂 to see the benefits.