Social Impact of SSH Research: New Definitions and Instruments

More than 38 percent of the funding allocated under the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon2020, is dedicated to research on societal challenges such as health, energy and climate. This amounts to 29.7 billion Euros in funding for research with the explicit aim of making social impact. However, the social sciences and humanities (SSH) have only played a marginal role in the societal challenges of Horizon2020. According to Science Europe, the pan-European association for research councils and foundations, only 26.7 percent of the topics under the Horizon2020’s societal challenges explicitly invite contributions from SSH research. If we look at the humanities in isolation, it is only around 10 percent of the topics. The marginal role of SSH in Horizon2020 is, among other things, the result of an inadequate understanding of the social impact of SSH research and of inadequate instruments for measuring the impact of SSH research. In this paper we address the following questions: 1) how can we understand the social impact of SSH research? And 2) how can we meaningfully measure or assess it? These questions are addressed through a survey of the current scientific literature combined with a systematic survey of reports and whitepapers from key European research institutions, funding agencies and universities. Based on the combined literature survey the paper aims at providing a more adequate understanding the social impact of SSH research and an overview of the tools and instruments available for measuring it. The paper is based on research conducted within the Horizon2020-funded project ACCOMPLISSH, which aims to create a social platform for accelerating impact-oriented research in the social sciences and humanities.