Announcement of Availability of Funds for Secondary Data Analysis of Evidence-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Programs | AH TPE 16 001

Opportunity Information: Apply for AH TPE 16 001

The funding opportunity titled "Announcement of Availability of Funds for Secondary Data Analysis of Evidence-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Programs" (Funding Opportunity Number: AH TPE 16 001) is a discretionary federal grant offered as a cooperative agreement through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, specifically tied to the Office of Adolescent Health (OAH). Its central goal is to strengthen the existing evidence base on teen pregnancy prevention by using secondary analyses of already-collected, high-quality evaluation data. Rather than funding new program implementation or fresh data collection, the opportunity is designed to help researchers ask new, policy-relevant questions about what works, for whom, under what conditions, and why, using datasets from rigorous evaluations of programs that have already been identified as effective by the HHS Pregnancy Prevention Evidence Review.

A key theme of the FOA is expanding what can be learned from prior federal investments in teen pregnancy prevention evaluation, especially work conducted during fiscal years 2010 through 2014. Applicants are encouraged to use evaluation datasets connected to OAH-supported studies, but the FOA is not limited to those sources. Projects may draw from large nationally representative datasets, and from other federal, state, or local governmental data systems, as well as nonpublic or private datasets if the applicant can clearly explain that they already have access or have a realistic plan and authority to obtain and use the data. The expectation is that applicants will work with rigorous, credible data sources and apply either advanced analytic methods, creative dataset integration, or both, to explore questions that were not addressed in the original evaluation studies.

Because this is a cooperative agreement, OAH is not just a pass-through funder; it plays an active role in how the project is carried out. The agency describes "substantial involvement" in several ways, including helping connect awardees with other funded organizations for collaboration, assisting in setting and refining project priorities over time, and formally reviewing and approving analysis plans after datasets are secured and before the project moves fully into the analytic phase. On top of that, OAH will provide ongoing monitoring and technical assistance typical of cooperative agreements, such as regular (monthly) phone meetings, review of work plans and budgets, and continuous oversight of procedures and progress to ensure the funded work stays aligned with the approved objectives.

The FOA is specifically focused on secondary data analysis related to core teen pregnancy prevention outcomes. The main outcomes of interest include condom use, sexual activity, use of effective contraceptive methods, pregnancies and births, and incidence of sexually transmitted infections. The announcement also makes room for additional risk or protective factors and other outcomes that may be important for understanding adolescent sexual health, signaling that proposals can be broader than a narrow set of endpoints as long as they remain clearly connected to pregnancy prevention and the evidence base.

There are several important boundaries that shape what a competitive proposal looks like. The funding is not meant to support new data collection, continuous ongoing analysis unrelated to discrete research questions, or the long-term maintenance and distribution of datasets. Instead, projects must propose analyses that are meaningfully distinct from what the original research team already did when the data were first collected. In other words, applicants need to avoid simply repeating the original impact study or re-testing the same outcomes in the same way. The FOA emphasizes originality and non-duplication, and it prioritizes analyses that look at program components, populations, sites, or settings that were not previously examined. A particularly high-priority idea described in the announcement is combining or pooling data from multiple rigorous evaluations of the same effective teen pregnancy prevention program, since that kind of synthesis can shed light on consistency of impacts and sources of variation that single studies often cannot resolve.

To guide applicants toward the kinds of questions OAH wants answered, the FOA lists six priority research questions. These include examining how much program effects vary across individuals, subgroups, and implementation sites; identifying which characteristics of programs, participants, and contexts predict or moderate differences in impacts; testing mechanisms that mediate effects (and explain why and how a program produces outcomes); estimating the effects of participation in specific components of multifaceted interventions; assessing how different levels of program quality or dosage relate to impacts; and developing or validating additional behavioral or intermediary measures that can be reliably collected from adolescents, especially younger adolescents ages 10 to 14, and that later correlate with the main outcome measures used in the HHS Evidence Review. Taken together, these priorities show that OAH is not only interested in whether programs work on average, but also in the underlying pathways, differential effects, and measurement improvements that can make future evaluations and real-world implementations more effective and more equitable.

In practical grant terms, the opportunity anticipated making two awards, with an award ceiling of $400,000 per award. Eligible applicants include a wide range of entities such as state governments, special district governments, public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, private institutions of higher education, federally recognized Native American tribal governments, and for-profit organizations other than small businesses. The original application closing date listed was April 8, 2016, and the funding authority is tied to Section 241 of the Public Health Service Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016 (P.L. 114-113), with funding subject to annual appropriations. Overall, the opportunity is aimed at generating deeper, more nuanced conclusions from existing evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention evaluations, with the expectation that the resulting insights can help reduce teen pregnancy rates and address persistent disparities across communities.

• The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health in the health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Announcement of Availability of Funds for Secondary Data Analysis of Evidence-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Programs" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 93.343.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2015-12-28.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2016-04-08. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $400,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 2 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, Special district governments, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Private institutions of higher education, For-profit organizations other than small businesses.

Apply for AH TPE 16 001

[Watch] Creating a grant proposal using the step-by-step wizard inside the applicant portal: