For many fellowships, postdocs may be given smaller ($10-30,000/year) amounts of independent research funds.
Do you have any tips for how best this money can be spent? What is the most bang-for-your-buck for a young independent researcher? Are there things that can be purchased that might benefit the researcher beyond their postdoc experience?
This is a hard question to answer since allocation of funds for a specific research is highly contextual to what is being studied. I would not focus so much on the "means" (i.e., what to purchase or how to allocate) but on the "ends." End products should be the focus. By that I mean, the creation of several scholarly articles for publication, a conference presentation, and possibly a book. The end game focus should also be tied to where the scholar may want to go after this phrase in his/her life.
Ajit:
Supposing I am doing an ethnographic case study of a group whose language I know. I wish to observe discreetly and perhaps engage in participatory observation, discreet individual interviews with open-ended questions and review of relevant documentations, historical and otherwise. Here is an adequate triangulation. In this case where do the following (your suggestions) fit in?:
1. Recruitment of manpower (not needed)
2. "Procurement for experimental set up" (not sure what this means, but there is no experiment here)
3. Surveys for data collection (this was not part of the triangulation of the case study and administering surveys for an ethnography can provide unnecessary exposure and too much social desirability bias in close-ended questions, especially if the study is culturally sensitive or reflects on personally sensitive aspects of the respondent)
My point is that monetary allocation is contextual to the study and its research design. There cannot be any predetermined listing for all studies as you have provided.
1- Hiring experimental setups (experimental and numerical results generally add important values to research), some setups now can be hired on line.
2- Publishing in highly reputed journals (where they order some charging, like IEEE and Nature journals).
3- Authoring book/s about results.
Literature and conferences may come at lower priorities as its benefits can be achieved more easily.
Some experimental work needs specialized laboratories. Such laboratories, equipped with dedicated experimental and/or measuring instruments, are very expensive (an example about in the field of electronics and communications is: spectrum and network analyzers, function generators, anechoic chambers....). If the researcher who is going to attend a post doctoral research do not have such laboratories available for him, some universities and research centers may offer dedicated laboratories to perform measurements for some time at some expense. An interesting application about that is the on-line laboratories, where a researcher support the set-up of his experiment, the settings of each instrument in the set-up, his parameters, and collects results, all of that is over the web, at some charge of course.
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