Communicative methodology has been acknowledged as having an impact at all levels: social, political, and scientific. The social impact is achieved with communicative methodology by involving the people or communities we intend to study from the beginning to the end of the research. There are positive benefits to those involved, which increases the impact. Therefore, communicative methodology enhances the potential of stakeholders (including those traditionally excluded) for social transformation through the use of egalitarian dialogue. Additionally, those stakeholders co-lead the research and promote change in their own social environments because of their inclusion in all stages of the research process. The theoretical basis of communicative methodology led to the assumption of postulates that enable social transformation. Researchers, taking into account the theoretical principles and postulates, interpret reality through dialogic knowledge while researching with vulnerable populations. This article illustrates how it is possible to attain social impact using communicative methodology in diverse contexts and points out how the communicative organization of research and the communicative analysis of data can be decisive in attaining social impact. Such change contributes to the social and educational transformation of reality and to improving the lives of vulnerable populations.

Gender violence poses a serious risk for women, girls, and children worldwide. Despite all efforts put forth to curtail it, few successful results have emerged. Narratives have been used to denounce the reality lived by survivors. However, scarcely any literature has explored how they get to question their own reality and, if they do, how these survivors are able to break the circle of gender violence by making room for nonviolent and egalitarian relationships. This article is a step in this direction: It explores how some girls, after participating in an initiative based on the language of desire, known as “Dialogic Feminist Gatherings,” encourage one another to question the dominant model of socialization in relationships in which attraction is linked to violent behaviors. The analysis focuses on communicative daily life stories (hereafter CDLS) performed in a Spanish high school with female teens after their participation in the gatherings. Drawing from these stories, the article illustrates how this methodological tool allows one to assess the impact of these gatherings on identifying the existence of this dominant model while also pushing to question it. This article also contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between attraction and violence, a risk factor for gender violence previously noted in the scientific literature. The knowledge obtained through this inquiry reinforces an evidence-based approach to having an effective social impact on the struggle against gender violence.

Research about masculinities gathers different topics from diverse disciplinary perspectives. One of the topics has been the analysis of the perpetuation’s effect of the traditional heterosexual model of masculinity in the violence against women. Recent scientific evidences about the reproduction of this social problem have evidenced the existence of three different types of masculinities (in the sense of the weberian ideal types): dominant traditional masculinity (DTM), oppressed traditional masculinity (OTM), and new alternative masculinities (NAM). The first two types contribute to perpetuate gender violence, while the latter allows preventing it and, consequently, it leads to its overcoming. This article approach the existence of these three types of masculinities and analyzes both, theirs characteristics and their consequences for violence against women. It presents evidences that what makes NAM providing a preventive effect is its linkage between the language of ethics and the language of desire.

Previous research has generally found that providing specific research evidence about concrete improvements in the development of field work promotes the achievement of social impact during the research process itself ( Aiello et al., 2021 ). This result opens as a prospective for further research to specify which scientific evidences can promote this impact in the different research topics, as well as the methodological aspects that will facilitate it. In research on gender violence, some of these evidences have already been identified—for example, the mirage of upward mobility ( Oliver, 2010-2012 ). However, the methodological aspects that will determine, when exposing such evidence, the social impact obtained during the research process have not been analyzed. In this sense, in the FREE TEEN DESIRE project, sharing this evidence with the participants using the language of desire has promoted transformations. This language of desire must be incorporated from its reality, being the result of a construction between the researcher and the participants. Its incorporation is enhanced if it is done in the context of Dialogic Feminist Gatherings (DFG). And, throughout the process, the researcher must adopt a role in which, among other things, she or he makes visible any attitude linked to violence when it becomes unattractive, as well as making visible the language of desire that is being constructed with respect to egalitarian relationships. The social impact of this research methodology was evidenced by the fact that after participating in DFG on the mirage of upward mobility, the girls’ intention to have a sporadic relationship with a boy with violent attitudes decreased ( Puigvert, 2016 ).

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