Suchergebnisse

The need to develop adequate methodologies to comprehensively assess the impact of research, especially the social impact of European Union (EU)-funded research, is one of the main concerns within the European Commission as well as for EU citizens, who are more active than ever. This article discusses the rationale behind using a qualitative approach to better address these concerns. Drawing on the FP7 IMPACT-EV research project, the present article discusses how to overcome a positivist approach that evaluates the social impact of research conducted only for its economic objectives and using only quantitative data. The focus on what is needed and what research is expected to bring to society are emphasized and made possible through qualitative inquiry of the social impact of the EU social sciences and the humanities (SSH) research. Thus, the development of qualitative-based analysis of the social impact of research is increasingly required to be conducted in dialogue with citizens.

The scientific and grey literature have highlighted the increasing relevance of the social impact of research. More and more, funding and evaluation agencies are using social impact as a required criterion when assessing the excellence of research proposals and researchers' CV. However, research has identified elemental confusions about what social impact is in most research proposals, CVs and consulting companies. Based on the communicative methodology which co-led the creation and elaboration of the priorities of social impact and co-creation, the study presented in this paper includes the knowledge co-created along years of dialogues with scientists and citizens and a documentary analysis of four official documents on social impact and researcher evaluation. Results identify the first scientific six guidelines to date on how to include researchers' actual or potential social impact in the research proposals and CVs1) To avoid confusing social impact with dissemination or transference; 2) To identify the concrete social impact of the specific scientific knowledge created by the authors; 3) To precise the concrete indicators of each social impact; 4) To specify the concrete sources; 5) To identify the interactive social impact; 6) To include the potential social impact.

Background: We are witnessing increasing demand from governments and society for all sciences to have relevant social impact and to show the returns they provide to society. Aims and objectives: This paper reports strategies that promote social impact by Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research projects.

Recently, the need to contribute to the evaluation of the scientific, social, and political impact of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research has become a demand of policy makers and society. The international scientific community has made significant advances that have transformed the impact of evaluation landscape. This article reviews the existing scientific knowledge on evaluation tools and techniques that are applied to assess the scientific impact of SSH research; the changing structure of social and political impacts of SSH research is investigated based on an overarching research question: to what extent do scholars attempt to apply methods, instruments, and approaches that take into account the distinctive features of SSH? The review also includes examples of European Union (EU) projects that demonstrate these impacts. This article culminates in a discussion of the development of the assessment of different impacts and identifies limitations, and areas and topics to explore in the future.