Title: Understanding the "impact" of health research: Lessons from the REF2014
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: In 1976, a German researcher linked sun bed use to skin cancer. In 2006, 30 years later, the Cooksey review of publicly funded health research stated that the UK was at risk of "failing to reap the full economic, health and social benefits of public investment in health research" due to research not being adequately translated into health outcomes. That same year, a 26 year old girl, Clare Oliver, was diagnosed with advanced melanoma and devoted her last 3 months to highlighting the dangers of the solarium industry, which she blamed for her melanoma. Clare's personal media campaign triggered state and federal health ministers to regulate the solarium industry and restrict its use by people with melanoma-prone skin. By the time Clare passed away, she had left behind a public health policy that had taken researchers over 30 years to achieve without her. Claire's story demonstrates Cooksey's concern: why did the strong research linking melanoma to sun bed use, first published in 1976, take so long to inform this health policy? The answer lies in current problems with translating high quality health research into social outcomes (societal impact). In 2014, a new evaluation framework, the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) will use a measure of how research has influenced the social, political and economic lives of citizens in order to distribute almost £1.76 billion of public funding. Including this new criterion, however, raises questions about how evaluations of societal impact will be made and what aspects are evaluated favourably. For health research, the societal benefits may be obvious, but assessing them is difficult. In Clare's case, how do we reward the research involved? Identifying which research was most responsible is challenging because it is difficult to pinpoint which research was the most influential. Was it the research that first linked solarium use to an increased risk of melanoma in 1976? Should it be Clare's doctor, the author of the systemaic review, the researcher that sat on the government committee, or the person who drafted the policy? The incorporation of societal impact in the REF2014 evaluations provides a unique opportunity to investigate how research evaluators handle this new impact criterion. The academic literature has yet to provide answers to these public health- and evaluation-policy issues, and several other countries (Australia, The Netherlands, New Zealand and The US) wish to include societal impact criteria in their evaluation policies, but are yet to be successful. A number of models to guide evaluations have been proposed, including those that solely measure the societal outcome (in Clare's case, the solarium policy) and those that focus on researcher behaviours known to be influential to achieve a societal impact (media engagement or advocacy). Unfortunately, the academic literature is undecided on which aspects are best used to guide evaluations. My research will investigate how evaluators define societal impact during the REF2014 evaluation. This timely research topic will use both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including analyses of how government policy documents refer to the concept of societal impact, the evaluator's academic background, and interviews with evaluators before and after the REF2014 evaluation process. The research will also investigate how evaluators use their own experience of societal impact to inform their how they define societal impact as part of research excellence. The results of my research will influence the development of evaluation policies that incorporate societal impact considerations both in the UK and abroad. It will also produce high-quality academic research articles that will be used to inform research on the importance of societal impact, contributing to a realisation that a definition of excellent research also includes how health research affects the quality of our everyday lives.


Research activity codes: 8.3 POLICY, ETHICS AND RESEARCH GOVERNANCE
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE