Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A community-led flood-resilience research project that measurably changes local emergency-preparedness behaviour, evidenced through follow-up surveys and local-authority records.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A dataset used only by other academic researchers to replicate findings has academic impact, not societal impact, absent evidence of change reaching beyond the research community.
Editorial commentary
Societal impact captures the social, community and civic effects of research — changes in public knowledge or attitudes, shifts in social practice, improvements in community wellbeing, equity gains, and contributions to civil-society institutions. It is one of several distinct categories under the broader research impact umbrella, alongside economic impact and policy impact, and should not be treated as a catch-all synonym for “impact beyond academia” generally.
Societal impact versus economic impact
The practical test for separating the two: societal impact is evidenced through changed practice, attitudes or wellbeing, even where no monetary value is attached, while economic impact requires a quantifiable financial effect (jobs, revenue, cost savings). A community health-literacy programme that measurably changes health-seeking behaviour is societal impact; the same programme’s effect on treatment costs avoided would be reported separately as economic impact. The two frequently co-occur in the same project but are evidenced, and often assessed, separately.
Assessment approaches
Societal change is typically multi-causal, slow, and culturally specific, which is why single-metric measurement is rarely credible here. Recognised methods include contribution analysis (attributing a share of an outcome to the research rather than claiming sole causation), social return on investment, and structured narrative case studies. The SIAMPI framework (Spaapen and van Drooge) and the French ASIRPA methodology both treat “productive interactions” between researchers and societal actors — meetings, joint activities, co-authored outputs with non-academic partners — as the mechanism through which societal impact accumulates, rather than something that appears only at a project’s end.
How societal impact is generated
Participatory research approaches are common precursors to strong societal-impact evidence, because they build the researcher-stakeholder relationships SIAMPI and ASIRPA treat as the impact mechanism itself: see citizen science, co-production, and public engagement with research.
References
- Spaapen J, van Drooge L, “Introducing ‘productive interactions’ in social impact assessment”, Research Evaluation, 2011. SIAMPI project documentation. ASIRPA methodology (INRAE).
Also known as
Social impact (research) · Community impact
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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