Policy and practice impacts of research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council

Wooding et al. examine how the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Future of Work (FoW) programme influenced policy and professional practice. They consider whether the Payback Framework, a conceptual model for research evaluation, is appropriate for social science, and look at the challenges in evaluating the impact of research on the social sciences. The main findings of this report were that the FoW programme had significant impacts on knowledge, research, public policy, and the policies and practices of organizations; however, the authors determined that the impact that a policy had was influenced by its environment. The FoW programme achieved this impact by providing total access to policymakers and, through the work of the Media Fellow, enhanced the impact on policymakers. They also concluded that the Payback Framework is a useful model for evaluating social science research; however, some impacts may be inaccessible to evaluation, and a confluence of inputs often make it difficult to attribute policy change to a given input. The project collected evidence through a review of the literature, interviews with key individuals involved in the programme, a survey of principal investigators, and four case studies of individual research grants. This research presents the detailed evidence collected during the study, including the complete case studies and a summary of evidence, analysis, and conclusions.