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The four UK higher education funding bodies 1 asked RAND Europe to review the assessment process for the impact element of the Research Excellence Framework 2014 in the UK, in order to assess the process and understand how it could be further improved.This report provides headlines from our study (overarching summary) and is supported by an in-depth analysis of the data gathered relating to each part of the assessment process. It is intended for those responsible for the REF and, more broadly, for those in the higher education sector. It may also be of interest to others working in the evaluation of research impact. RAND Europe is an independent not-for-profit policy research organisation that aims to improve policy and decisionmaking in the public interest, through research and analysis. RAND Europe's clients include European governments, institutions, non-governmental organisations and firms with a need for rigorous, independent, multidisciplinary analysis. This report has been peer-reviewed in accordance with RAND's quality assurance standards.
Purpose
Assessing the impact of research requires an approach that is sensitive both to the context of the research and the perspective of the stakeholders trying to understand its benefits. Here, the authors report on a pilot that applied such an approach to research conducted at the Collaborative Center for Health Equity (CCHE) of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Method
The pilot assessed the academic impact of CCHE’s work; the networks between CCHE and community partners; and the reach of CCHE’s programs, including an attempt to estimate return on investment (ROI). Data included bibliometrics, findings from a stakeholder survey and in-depth interviews, and financial figures.
Results
The pilot illustrated how CCHE programs increase the capacity of community partners to advocate for their communities and engage with researchers to ensure research benefits the community. The results illustrate the reach of CCHE’s programs into the community. The authors produced an estimate of the ROI for one CCHE program targeting childhood obesity, and values ranged from negative to positive.
Conclusions
The authors experienced challenges using novel assessment techniques at a small scale including the lack of comparator groups and the scarcity of cost data for estimating ROI. This pilot demonstrated the value of research from a variety of perspectives – from academic to community. It illustrates how metrics beyond grant income and publications can capture the outputs of an academic health center in a way that may better align with the aims of the center and stakeholders.
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