Measuring societal impact of research—Developing and validating an impact instrument for occupational health and safety

Ole Henning Sørensen, Jakob Bjørner, Andreas Holtermann, Johnny Dyreborg, Jorid Birkelund Sørli, Jesper Kristiansen and Steffen Bohni Nielsen

Research Evaluation, 2022, vol. 31, issue 1, 118-131

Abstract: Research funders and policymakers increasingly focus on societal benefits of their investments in research. Research institutions thus face increasing pressure to demonstrate their societal impact to prove their legitimacy and worth. To this end, research institutions need reliable, quantitative methods to measure societal impact. This article describes the development and test of an instrument to quantitatively measure societal impact of applied research at research institution and program levels. It demonstrates the successful validation of the instrument in the multi-disciplinary field of occupational health and safety. The instrument, the Societal Impact Instrument: Occupational Health and Safety Research (SII:OHSR), produces an aggregate measure of societal impact for the research institution as a whole and subscales for each research program. The SII:OHSR instrument is built on a process model of knowledge translation and exchange. It has been developed in the context of multi-disciplinary occupational health and safety research. The instrument is constructed as a generalized and context-independent tool that can be relocated to other research domains and languages. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first singular instrument that quantitatively measures societal impact. It is therefore highly pertinent for the research evaluation field.

Keywords: societal impact; impact assessment; impact instrument; research evaluation; research impact evaluation; occupational health and safety evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rseval:v:31:y:2022:i:1:p:118-131.

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