@Jason Thanks for asking! I'm planning to use this as a springboard. Starting with early, relatively-achievable studies that can produce multiple papers allows for a body of research that I can point to in the future. For instance, with my planned study comparing young people with VCFS to multiple control groups, I intend to investigate:

1: Scores on traditional 'clinical' scales (e.g. measures of schizotypy)

2: Scores on less 'clinical' scales, like traditional personality scales (which correlate well with these, but tend to be siloed in the literature)

3: "Mischievous responding", a problem with studying adolescents and young adults where people intentionally give wrong answers to questions; the framework of my intended study makes this uniquely easy to look at, because of the existence of multiple exclusionary criteria (e.g. family histories of certain disorders), which allows for catching many mischievous responders with "do you have a family history of [exclusionary condition]?" and similar(1)

4: Whether mainstream scales actually work in this population at all (some have been validated, but others haven't), and investigating alternative scales that would be applicable to multiple populations, making the research usable far more broadly than its original remit(2)

These findings split naturally (i.e. without "salami slicing") into several publications -- mischievous responding and its correlates, for instance, are interesting to a different audience of people than the results on the clinical scales. Nonetheless, they can all be done in the same research project and naturally amount to about 2-3 surveys. This allows for an early-stage project like that to be completed with much less money than a traditional large health-sciences project would require.

This is useful for navigating applications to multiple future areas (e.g. doctoral clinical psychology programs, funding dedicated specifically towards early-career researchers in the health sciences). Because my institution doesn't have the kind of research environment that's used to navigating traditional grants, or prestigiously-named PIs, there are pretty serious barriers to traditional funding bodies. I'm hoping that I can get a chance with a culture less tied up in name recognition, and parlay success that comes out of this into breaking into the more conventional environment of academia.

(1): Mischievous responding is a huge problem in large public health surveys, and we can suspect with near-certainty it's a similarly huge problem in other surveys of AYAs -- but the public health surveys where it comes up most severely, by definition, don't have exclusion criteria. A study where, for instance, a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder is exclusionary has the significant upside that "are you autistic?" is both a common mischievous-response and a question where we know any yes answers are lying. We don't understand much about the demographic correlates or response patterns of mischievous responders (aside from that males do it more often), and a study that silently tracks the responses of confirmed mischievous responders has significant value for understanding it in larger health surveys.

(2): There is a lot of unfilled demand for personality and mental health scales that we know with certainty work for people with intellectual disabilities.