The Midlife in the United States Study (U19) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Midlife in the United States Study (MIDUS) U19 opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number PAR 14 356) is a National Institutes of Health cooperative agreement designed to support the next five year cycle of MIDUS, a major national longitudinal study focused on health and well being across midlife and beyond. The core aim of this funding is to keep the MIDUS cohort moving forward as a long running research platform by completing key pending data collection waves, expanding scientific content in targeted areas, and ensuring that the resulting data remain widely usable by the broader research community through strong dissemination and user support.

A central deliverable for the next phase is completion of the third wave of longitudinal MIDUS data collection. This is essentially the next major follow up of participants, allowing researchers to study how health, psychological factors, social life, and economic circumstances change over time within the same individuals. Longitudinal follow up is what gives MIDUS much of its value, since it supports questions about trajectories and timing (for example, how earlier life stress relates to later cardiovascular risk, or how changes in work and family roles shape well being as people age).

The FOA also calls for enhancing MIDUS content related to daily stress. That emphasis signals continued development of measurement approaches that capture stress as it is experienced in everyday life, not only as a retrospective summary. Daily stress data often allow more precise links between short term experiences (like daily hassles, conflict, workload, caregiving strain, or sleep disruption) and outcomes such as mood, cognition, inflammation, health behaviors, and longer term disease risk. Strengthening this area increases the study's ability to connect real world exposures with both psychological and biological responses.

Another major requirement is completing the second wave of data collection for clinical biomarkers and affective neuroscience assessments. In practice, this means continuing and expanding MIDUS's integration of traditional survey and psychosocial measures with objective indicators of health and functioning. Clinical biomarkers can include physiological measures relevant to aging and chronic disease risk, while affective neuroscience components can support research on emotion related brain and behavioral processes. The second wave aspect is important because repeated biological and neuroscience measurement allows researchers to examine change, stability, and cumulative risk, rather than relying on a single snapshot.

The announcement highlights continued support for innovative sub studies, including work on how psychosocial influences affect gene expression. This points to MIDUS's role in linking social and psychological experiences with molecular and biological pathways, a line of research often associated with questions about stress biology, immune functioning, and mechanisms through which life context "gets under the skin." The FOA also explicitly encourages novel methods to track and reinstate non responders, reflecting a practical but scientifically critical goal: maintaining cohort participation and reducing attrition bias. Better retention and re engagement methods help preserve representativeness and statistical power, and they protect the integrity of long term inference.

Beyond collecting new data, the FOA emphasizes connecting these content areas through innovative analyses across multiple domains already central to MIDUS. Applicants are expected to integrate and link information on health and physical functioning, personality and psychological characteristics, cognitive status, affective functioning, economic well being, social relationships, and broader well being outcomes. The intent is not simply parallel data streams, but coordinated science that can examine interactions across levels (social, psychological, behavioral, and biological) and across time. This kind of integration is what enables MIDUS to serve as a shared national resource for research on aging, resilience, inequality, and health disparities.

Data dissemination is treated as a central goal rather than an afterthought. The FOA stresses maintaining and enhancing data distribution and user support, specifically supporting public use files and encouraging broad scientific use. In other words, the award is meant to sustain MIDUS not only as a study that collects data, but also as an infrastructure that curates, documents, and shares the data in ways that make it feasible for outside investigators to conduct high quality analyses. Strong user support typically implies clear documentation, harmonized variables across waves, guidance on complex data components (like biomarker and neuroscience measures), and systems that help researchers access and use the data responsibly and efficiently.

From an administrative standpoint, this is a discretionary funding opportunity using a cooperative agreement mechanism (U19), meaning NIH expects substantial programmatic involvement compared with a standard research project grant. The activity category is Health, with the CFDA number 93.866 (Aging Research). There is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The opportunity was posted October 2, 2014, created October 14, 2014, and had a final closing date of September 26, 2017 (with an archive date of February 7, 2018).

Eligibility is broad across government, academic, nonprofit, and certain for profit entities, including public and state controlled and private institutions of higher education, nonprofits (including 501(c)(3) and certain non 501(c)(3) organizations), small businesses, and multiple levels of government (state, county, city or township, special districts, and housing authorities). It also lists eligibility for several mission specific institution types such as HBCUs, Hispanic serving institutions, tribally controlled colleges and universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian serving institutions, and AANAPISI institutions, as well as faith based or community based organizations and eligible federal agencies. At the same time, the FOA clearly excludes non U.S. entities: foreign organizations and foreign institutions are not eligible to apply, non U.S. components of U.S. organizations are not eligible, and foreign components (as defined in NIH policy) are not allowed.

For reference, the full announcement was hosted by NIH at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa files/PAR 14 356.html, and NIH provided an Office of Extramural Research contact for access or linking issues via FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV.

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