Resources for Researchers

A purpose statement, or problem statement, ties your project directly to a problem to be solved in the world. It is the big-picture reason or goal you have for doing this work. Purpose statements can be about large-scale global challenges, your organization’s mission, the goals of the agency funding your work, or can focus on the goals of external partners involved in the project such as community members, educators, or policy makers.

Your purpose statement should focus on your goal of contributing to a solution to a problem for particular people, communities, or places in the world. A purpose statement is about a problem outside of the academic literature; it is not the same as a research question. Below is one example of a Purpose Statement and the related Research Question for a project focused on climate change impacts to cultural resources.

This project directly contributes to reducing the damaging impacts of climate change on cultural resources in the US, helping to protect and preserve them for future generations. Cultural resources, like buildings and structures, are threatened by climate change. Loss of these resources represents a loss of our collective history and the embedded knowledge contained within them. There is insufficient understanding of how extreme rain events projected under climate change will impact different building materials. This project tests the durability of three different materials (adobe, earthen walls, and wood) under simulated rain events based on projections of future precipitation intensity.

Below are some examples of societal goals you can explore to find the best fit for your project.

YOUR IMPACTS PLAN:

Open this impacts planning template. Respond to the questions on page one about your Purpose Statement.

For a project planning template, click here: 

For a project reporting template, click here: 

You will need Adobe Reader to access the form. Keep the form open as you read through each section and answer the questions in the form as you go. This will give you notes and ideas you can use when you write your research proposal or create an impacts plan for an on-going project.

Generating societal impact means that your research must connect to society (including our biophysical and built environments). There are many ways to make that connection, but research has shown that direct engagement between researchers and societal partners makes it more likely that research or new information/knowledge be used and eventually create impact.

Pathways to Impact

Not every research project needs to take the same path from research to impact. Different paths will work for different people and different projects. Just keep in mind that for research to contribute to societal impacts, there needs to be a direct connection. The “loading dock model”, where we published research in a journal and left it out there for someone to pick up, is very rarely the most effective approach. Some frequently used pathways (but not a complete list by any means) include:

• Engaged Research - researchers and non-academic, societal partners work together as partners throughout the project. This pathway may include research approaches like community-based participatory research, transdisciplinary research, or co-production of knowledge.
• Public Engagement - sharing research findings with diverse public audiences in ways that make it accessible and relevant such as public lectures, informal education activities (museums or science centers); this may include consciously sharing through traditional or social media outlets.
• Commercialization - particularly in biomedical and technology research, commercialization may be the most direct route from research to use of a new tool, technique, or medication.
• Education and Capacity-Building - sharing research - or the process of conducting research - through K-12 or other education programs can build the capacity of young learners to engage in research. Resource-sharing, such as agreements to share research instruments with other institutions can build the capacity of other research institutions.

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The important thing is to make sure to plan a pathway you want to be on and one that fits the project goals. For example, if working with youth isn’t your passion, but you do like public speaking you will want to focus on an impact pathway that allows you to find opportunities to make your research accessible and relevant to a public audience - and to get out and share your enthusiasm for the work. Modes of Engagement

Modes of Engagement

If your Pathway to Impact involves direct engagement and collaboration with societal partners, the next step is to plan your engagement processes and activities. The key to successful, respectful engagement is to develop a plan that helps you and your partners participate to the extent that is feasible and desirable for all. Below you will find descriptions of a range of ways to design an engaged research project draw from work by Alison Meadow and colleagues as well as Dominique David-Chavez and Michael Gavin.)

Points of Engagement

In engaged research projects, the goal is to collaborate with people, organizations, or communities who are directly affected by the problem the research aims to help solve so that they can bring their lived experience, professional or technical expertise, and other insights to bear on the research and potential solutions. There are opportunities for external partners to be involved in every stage of a research project. Every person might not engage in every step, but consider how and when you can bring your partners’ experience and expertise into the project.

Engagement and Trust

One of the most important elements in engaged research and moving research into use is trust (Stern et al. 2021). Community partners, practitioners, and other decision makers are not likely to use research to inform decisions and actions if they do not trust the information or the source of the information.

Engaging with our community partners offers us a number of ways to build trust at interpersonal, institutional, and system-wide scales. By putting the concerns and priorities of our community partners at the center of our work, we demonstrate that their experiences and expertise are important and that we, as individuals and representatives of our institution, are committed to co-developing solutions, which can help build trust in the researcher and the institution (APLU 2019). We also assure that the research findings will be relevant and applicable to them (Cash et al. 2002), which increases the likelihood that the findings will be used. By incorporating community and practitioner partners into the research process, we make the process of science transparent so more people see how science is developed, where the strengths and weaknesses are, and how best to use the information (Oliver et al. 2014). When we open the process and incorporate people’s input and expertise, they consider the process more legitimate, which also increases trust and perceptions of the usability of the findings (Cash et al. 2002).

A recent report on community-university relations at the University of Arizona offers a number of best practices to consider for establishing and sustaining partnerships with community members and other external research partners:

• Focus on establishing long-term relationships.
• Work on the timelines and time frames that are relevant to your partners.
• Be clear, frequent, and honest in communicating with partners.
• Share University resources, such as physical space and equipment as well as expertise, with partners whenever possible.
• Treat external partners with respect. They are experts on their lives, experiences, and domains of knowledge without whom we have an incomplete understanding of our research.

Research Ethics

When we work with people in the course of our research, we need to be attentive to ethical principles and requirements. Research involving people or information about people generally must follow a set of rules about the inclusion of human subjects. People participating in research must do so of their own free will and with their informed consent; the research must minimize risk to the extent possible and maximize the potential benefits to society; and the risks of the research must be fairly distributed across participants, with no group at intentionally greater risk than another.

Review and oversight of research that involved human subjects happens through Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). For more detailed information about human subjects research, training requirements for conducting human subjects research, and University of Arizona’s IRB policies and procedures, please visit the Human Subjects Protection Program website.

When we undertake engaged research, as we’ve been describing above, we change the relationship between researchers and societal partners. No longer are community members the subject of research – they are collaborators in the process. And engaged research often occurs at a community or organizational scale, just just with individuals, so we need to take into account the consent of the collective group. We need to consider how to reach beyond our standard research ethics principles to recognize these partnerships. Some factors to consider are representation - how our community or practitioner partners are portrayed in the research findings and represented to the outside world, self-determination - the rights of Indigenous and other communities to decide whether and how research will be conducted, deference - our ability to recognize and respect other forms of knowledge and expertise, especially when others’ knowledge is more salient in a particular situation, and reciprocity - how our research will generate direct benefits for the people involved. More resources on the ethics of community engaged research can be found in Ethics and Action Research and Expanded Ethical Principles for Research Partnership.

Engagement with Indigenous Peoples

If you will engage with Indigenous Peoples in your research, it is important to affirm the rights of Indigenous Peoples through the conduct of your research.

At The University of Arizona, we have two inter-related policies that govern UA engagement with Indigenous Peoples. Be sure to review the policies and follow the guidance available here before beginning your project. https://nptao.arizona.edu/research-engagement-guidelines

Other resources that may be helpful when developing a research engagement with Indigenous Peoples are:

• The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf
• The Food and Agriculture Organization’s guidebook on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/8a4bc655-3cf6-44b5-b6bb-ad2aeede5863/content
• The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance https://www.gida-global.org/care
• The National Science Foundation’s revised requirements for Seeking and Obtaining Tribal Nation Approval for Proposals that May Impact Tribal Resources or Interests (Chapter II.E.10 of the PAPPG https://new.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/summary-changes)

YOUR IMPACTS PLAN:

Return to your Planning or Reporting template and complete the tables on pages two and three of the Engagement section.

Impact descriptors use our understanding of knowledge use to help us describe the many ways our research is contributing to positive changes in the world or for our external research partners.

Impact Descriptors

Want more?

Meadow, A. M., & Owen, G. (2021). Planning and Evaluating the Societal Impacts of Climate Change Research Projects: A guidebook for natural and physical scientists looking to make a difference. http://doi.org/10.2458/10150.658313

Edwards, D. M., & Meagher, L. R. (2020). A framework to evaluate the impacts of research on policy and practice: A forestry pilot study. Forest Policy and Economics, 101975. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.101975

Meadow, A. M., Owen, G., Joshi, N., & Lodge Otto, E. (2024). Combining Impact Goal and Impact Descriptor Frameworks to Elucidate the Societal Impacts of Research: A Pilot Study. Research For All. https://doi.org/10.14324/RFA.08.1.03

YOUR IMPACTS PLAN

Return to your Impacts Plan Template and complete the table on page four on Describing Impacts.

Collecting robust evidence of impact is important to maintaining credibility (we can prove that we did what we said we did!) and for improving future practice (what worked, what didn’t, why, and what can we do better next time?). There are many different approaches to collecting evidence of impact and it is important to choose a method that meets the goals of your project and is feasible within your project scope and timeline. There are a few principles to keep in mind for any evidence:

• Evidence of impact should be demonstrable; you should be able to provide specific examples to support your claims about impact.
• "Community partners are in the best position to describe their observation of the impacts of the partnership" (NASEM 2025), so focus your efforts on eliciting feedback from the people you have worked with and the people you intended to use your research.
• Although you need demonstrable examples, evidence does not always need collected through formal processes. Working closely and consistently with your partners can provide you with many opportunities to collect examples and evidence of impacts.
• In some cases, the best way to collect evidence of impact will be through formal data collection such as surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Be aware that some funders require formal data collection and analysis for broader and societal impacts activities; be prepared to incorporate those into your project from the very beginning.
• You do not need to demonstrate that you completely solved the problem you identified in your purpose statement – focus on showing how and to what extent you contributed to finding a solution and how the project helped to make change.

Working with Informal Feedback

Sometimes the best feedback we get from our partners comes during informal conversations or communications like email. These informal communications can be powerful evidence of impact if we are conscientious about documenting them. This approach is most appropriate when you are working with a small and defined group of partners such as a community-based organization or one group within an agency or larger organization. Some ideas for documenting informal feedback are:

• Start a folder where you can save emails from your project partners about how the project is going, what is working well, anything they are struggling with, and any examples of uses and impacts they share with you. Review the folder regularly so your team can address challenges or questions and you have examples of how your partners are using the research on-hand.
   
• Get in the habit of asking a few key questions every few months:
  • Has anything we're learning in this project surprised you or been unexpected?
  • What has resonated with you the most recently?
  • What do you think we need to learn more about or explore in more detail?
  • How do you see yourself using the research in your work or day-to-day life so far?
  • Do you have any examples of how you've used the research?
• Keep notes for yourself and your team about your partners' responses.

Formal Data Collection

If your project has proposed to generate impact for a larger group of people or a physical landscape, you may need to rely on formal data collection approaches. It's not possible to have ongoing conversations and communications with a whole community, such as those described above. There are many research and evaluation methods that can help you collect evidence about your project. Below we summarize some of the most common.

Surveys

Surveys are an efficient tool for gathering information, even from a large audience, and can provide quantitative and qualitative insights. Surveys typically involve a set of structured questions that can be answered in various formats, such as multiple choice, rating scales, or open-ended responses. They are usually in written form (paper or electronic) and are completed independently by participants; but they can also be completed orally with responses recorded by the evaluator. 

You may decide to send a survey to all of your external project partners at the end of the project to ask them questions about how they participated in the project, what they contributed, what they learned, and what they have done with the project outputs or any changes they've made related to the project.

When to Choose

• You need primarily quantitative data or standardized responses that can be easily analyzed.
• You have a need to collect data efficiently from many participants.
• Your questions – and their answers – are relatively straightforward and could be addressed with yes/no, multiple choice, or a scale response, or via open-ended questions that don’t require elaborate answers.
• You want to compare answers across different groups or demographics.

Best for

• Measuring trends, patterns, or behaviors.
• Getting a broad understanding of opinions, behaviors, or characteristics, especially about topics that are already well defined or well understood.
• Reaching participants remotely or anonymously.
• Rigorous measurement of outcomes across an entire population.

Limitations

• Difficult to capture deep, qualitative insights or complex emotions. Responses are often multiple choice or yes/no. When open-ended, responses tend to be shorter and lack the depth of other methods.
• Limited ability to ask follow-up questions or clarify responses.

Interviews

Interviews are a process involving the evaluator asking open-ended questions to a person or people who have knowledge of or experience with the topic being researched, listening to and recording the answers, and following up with additional relevant questions. Interviews are usually conducted with one participant at a time.

You might want to interview some of your key partners at the end of your project in order to dig deeper on questions about their experiences working on the project, what they have learned, and how they perceive that the project has benefited (or not) their community or organization.

When to Choose

• You need in-depth, qualitative data from individuals.
• You are exploring a complex topic where participants’ perspectives and experiences are central.
• You want to ask open-ended questions and explore detailed narratives.
• You need the flexibility to probe and ask follow-up questions.

Best for

• Understanding personal experiences, motivations, and emotions.
• Studying sensitive topics, where developing a relationship between the researcher or evaluator and participant matters.
• Gaining rich, contextual information from a select number of experts or key stakeholders.

Limitations

• Time-consuming and resource-intensive to conduct and analyze, especially if interviewing many people.
• Responses can be harder to summarize and compare across participants.
• Learning to conduct high-quality interviews may require additional time or training.

Policy Citations

Tracing the use of your research in policy or policy-related documents can help you build evidence that your research is credible, salient, and useful to policy makers. To track your individual policy impact, you can create a free Sage Policy Profile (https://policyprofiles.sagepub.com/), which will generate a summary of which of your research outputs have been cited in policy documents as well as providing links to those documents. Once you have a profile, it will automatically update as new citations emerge.

If you would like to explore the policy uses of a group of people, such as a research team or an academic program or department, the Overton (https://www.overton.io/) database of 23 million+ policy documents (and counting) allows you to search by DOI, name, and institutional affiliation. It will find all the citations to a piece of research and generate a report or a set of Powerpoint slides to help you share the findings. Overton requires a subscription for use.

Altmetric (https://www.altmetric.com/) is a free tool that tracks the academic and policy citations of a particular article as well as its appearance in social media and traditional media. While Altmetric’s policy database is not as complete as the Overton database, it can provide you with real-time information about where your research is being shared.

External Project Evaluation

Some research funders require that projects be formally evaluated by a trained external evaluator. If that is a requirement from your funder, University of Arizona has a number of resources to help.

The Office of Societal Impact

Center for Educational Assessment, Research, and Evaluation (CEARE) in the College of Education

Community, Research, Evaluation and Development

Southwest Institute for Research on Women

YOUR IMPACTS PLAN

Return to your Impacts Plan Template and complete the table on page five on Evidence of Impact.

There are many ways to share the story (and evidence) of your project’s impact. Your funder may require an impact narrative or description as part of your final report. Or you may need to report examples of impact to your department or organization.

Impact Case Studies

The United Kingdom's Research Excellence Framework (REF) Case Study Database allows you to browse and search for impact case studies submitted to the REF during each reporting cycle. REF impact case studies come from all research disciplines and provide examples of a wide range of research impacts. The case studies can help provide a template and inspiration for writing your own impact case study. https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/impact

Examples from UA https://impact.arizona.edu/research-impacts-project

Peer-Reviewed Publications

If you have a good example of how you engaged with societal partners and generated impactful research, consider writing a scholarly paper about your experience. There are a number of journals that focus on the practice and impact of engaged research. Here are a few titles to get you started:

• Societal Impacts (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/societal-impacts)
• Community Science (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/26929430)
• Research for All (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/r4a/)
• Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (https://engagementscholarship.org/publications/journals)

Promotion & Tenure and Professional Advancement

In order for university-based researchers to do societally impactful work, they need support and recognition from their employers and supervisors. In academia, what is valued is often reflected in the criteria for promotion, tenure, and career advancement. Universities, research funders, and scientific professional societies are increasingly open to incorporating criteria related to engaged research and societal impact into their reward structures. However, large-scale institutional change is challenging and takes time. Here we share some examples of promising practices in incorporating societal impact as a criterion in academic reward structures.

• A 2023 white paper from the Impact Funders Forum which “provides an overview of promising attempts to reform and/or strengthen promotion and tenure (P&T) systems to reward the societal impact of research.” The authors note a number of innovations already underway in several US universities including
  • Campus- and system-wide (i.e., in public university systems) reforms to faculty advancement guidelines, criteria, and language.
  • Formalized roles and review processes to build institutional capacity for implementing faculty advancement guidelines in university departments, schools, and colleges.
  • Capacity-building for faculty in developing P&T cases.
     
• University of Arizona's Promotion Criteria recognize the value of Publicly Engaged Scholarship
  
  [P]romotion and tenure reviews, as detailed in the criteria of individual departments and colleges, will recognize original research contributions in peer-reviewed publications as well as integrative and applied forms of scholarship that involve cross-cutting collaborations with business and community partners, including translational research, commercialization activities, and patents.
   

• Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment incorporates engaged scholarship into promotion and tenure criteria.

  Evaluation of candidates should recognize and value:

  1. the diversity of scholarship within and among these disciplines and the associated qualities that constitute an outstanding research record;
  2. interdisciplinary contributions both at established interfaces between distinct disciplines and at new interfaces between previously separate areas and modes of inquiry; and
  3. engaged scholarship, which is reflected in efforts and products that are often outside the traditional measures of research excellence within disciplines.
      
• The National Science Foundation has supported an effort to reform promotion and tenure guidelines to incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship. The Promotion and Tenure - Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PTIE) initiative is a global movement to support the inclusive recognition of innovation & entrepreneurship (I&E) impact by university faculty in promotion, tenure & advancement guidelines and practices. 
   
• The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities published a set of recommendations for Modernizing Scholarship for the Public Good. Among the recommendations are that higher education institutions should:
  • Explicitly value a variety of different forms of scholarship and impact
  • Link promotion criteria to institution-wide mission and definitions
  • Structure documents to elevate engagement & equity work
  • Expand who counts as a “peer” during review
  • Provide training and support for reviewers

Impact CV

An impact CV can be an effective complement to your standard academic CV that allows you to track and communicate the impact of your work beyond standard academic metrics. Some possible categories for your impact CV include:

• Research Capacity Building
• Informing Decision Making
• Health Impacts
• Economic Impacts
• Social Impacts
• Impact Practices

The Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes has made a template available for download.

Compiling an impact CV means that you will always have examples of your impact on-hand when preparing for annual reviews, developing promotion materials, or when applying for funding. The summary statement(s) including in our Research Impact Report Template are a great way to capture brief descriptions of your societal impacts for you CV. 

Just like your standard CV, make sure to update your impact CV regularly so it is ready to present whenever you need it.

Narrative CV

A narrative CV is another format for communicating the impact of your work beyond academia. A narrative CV provides a structured written description of a person’s contributions and achievements that reflects a broad range of relevant skills and experiences, more than can often be seen in a traditional academic CV. Categories in a narrative CV might include mentoring, innovation and tech transfer, team science and collaboration across disciplines, commitment to open science, as well as societal impacts like those discussed in this toolkit.

Some research funders, particularly in Europe and the United Kingdom, now request narrative CVs in funding applications as part of efforts to recognize and reward a broader range of research skills and outcomes. For example, UK Research and Innovation provides a flexible template for applicants that allows individuals or research teams to provide summaries of how the researcher(s)

• Contribute to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies or knowledge

• Contribute to the development of others and maintenance of effective working relationships 

• Contribute to the wider research and innovation community 

• Contribute to broader research/innovation-users and audiences and towards wider societal benefit