Ethical Engagement & Impact Resources
Ensuring ethical engagement and impact in research is crucial for fostering responsible and inclusive research practices. This collection of resources aims to provide a comprehensive overview of best practices and ethical guidelines that can be used to ensure that research benefits are equitably shared and responsibly managed. Whether you are a researcher looking to enhance the ethical integrity of your work, an institution developing policies for responsible research, or a funding body seeking to support ethical research practices, these resources offer valuable insights and actionable recommendations.
Principle 1: Build capability among those who may be affected impacted by research impact activities to engage as equals.
Be led by the needs and priorities of those who may be affected impacted by or interested in engaging with research impact. Build capability and capacity with these groups, paying attention to power dynamics, enabling them to engage (to the extent they so desire) as equals with researchers through knowledge sharing, access to resources, training, and other forms of support as appropriate to the context.
-
Assess the capabilities and capacities of all relevant parties to determine needs, ewhere possible enabling these groups to lead the assessment themselves where possible, and where they so desire.
-
Offer resources, training, and other opportunities that are tailored to the specific needs and contexts that have been identified in the needs assessment, where relevant, leading to qualifications.
-
Empower non-research partners to take on leadership roles within the project, providing them with the necessary resources and decision-making power, to ensure the research delivers impacts that meet their needs.
-
Institutions should consider resource allocation to relevant third parties, to enable their meaningful engagement.
-
Funders should reimburse institutions for 100% of the costs of engaging with non-research partners.
-
Institutions should fund, support[1] , and encourage researchers to conduct stakeholder analyses and establish and facilitate steering groups for research projects.
This guide on community engagement with research (based on the TRUST Code below) encourages researchers to ask questions based on four values:
-
“Fairness: How are the communities meaningfully involved in discussions about the aims of the research, including why it is needed and who will benefit?
-
Honesty: Have all background details been shared and discussed with the community, including the funding situation and the intentions of the researchers?; What procedures will be used for two-way, open communication?; What procedures are in place to ensure understanding of research issues without being patronising?; What promises are being made to the community and can they be fulfilled?
-
Respect: How are community preferences for engagement strategies being discussed and acted upon?; Are the relevant community spokespersons or representatives being consulted?; Is permission from community elders/leaders or representatives needed for this consultation?; How are the research team familiarising themselves with local culture – including organizational structures, history, traditions, relationship with the environment, and sensitivities?
-
Care: How are local needs and the potential for capacity building being taken into account in development of the aims? Is due attention being paid to the impact of the study and the study team upon the participants, their families, the local community and the environment?” (p. 19).
It also provides guidance on:
-
Planning for dissemination of sensitive or controversial findings, especially with vulnerable groups, to avoid altering power dynamics within communities, exacerbating conflicts, or creating stigmatization or discrimination; and
-
The ethics of evaluating research impact, suggesting that in the context of community engagement, “research without any perceived benefits is unethical,” if communities have invested resources in the research. It suggests communities should be involved in impact evaluations, giving them credit for their input, and letting them define criteria for evaluating whether or not beneficial impacts have occurred from their perspective (rather than the perspective of researchers or funders). Where adverse impacts are identified, the need for a transparent approach to resolving complaints is emphasized.
Pacific research protocols from the University of Otago
The protocols include three values that are significant for the ethics of engagement and impact:
-
“5.1 Meaningful engagement between researchers and research participants requires developing, maintaining, and sustaining relationships that involve mutual trust” (p. 109). Specific suggestions include establishing advisory groups to help build trust through the engagement process and ensuring researchers are trained to “consult” effectively (p. 109).
-
“6.2 Reciprocity in research requires that knowledge gained through research will be used to benefit research participants and (where relevant) other people” (p. 110). A number of suggestions are made including building capacity and capability to extend reciprocity (e.g. via training including the opportunity to gain qualifications) and ensuring accessibility of findings to local communities.
-
“11.1 Capacity and capability building is critical to improving Pacific knowledge outcomes through research” (p. 112) as part of a commitment to the empowerment of local communities.
This guide for researchers seeing to work with Māori groups is relevant to researchers working with similar groups elsewhere. The research focused on how “non-indigenous scientists embrace the geographical, cultural, and social places they find themselves as manuhiri (guests).” In this sense, being a guest is not limited to geographic location; it can also be applied to metaphorical and conceptual places, stemming from the knowledges associated with indigenous peoples. That is, it can be applied to real, imagined, and conceptual spaces. Nine indicators can help non-indigenous researchers navigate the co-production of knowledge and practices. The term “methodological sensitivities” invites an embodied collective responsiveness by researchers and their collaborators (and funders) to the knowledge systems, situations, aspirations, challenges, and invitations. 10 attributes were identified for researchers to engage appropriately with Māori, and 10 principles and guidelines for engagement with Māori are also identified.
This guide encourages visiting scientists to engage in specific activities to foster trust and effective collaboration with local people. This involves tailoring research to local issues involving relevant actors and respecting local contexts and ethics. Successful collaborations based on clear communication and genuine partnership are more likely to deliver lasting benefits and improved outcomes.
MULTI-ACT Collective Research Impact Framework
This framework provides a structured approach to evaluate and enhance the impact of multi-stakeholder health research initiatives. It introduces a multidimensional impact assessment model that integrates scientific excellence, economic performance, social impact, patient-reported outcomes, and mission effectiveness. The framework emphasizes engagement, particularly involving patients, to co-create research agendas and assess impact comprehensively. It includes tools such as the Master Scorecard for monitoring progress and a digital toolbox for managing engagement and data collection.
Co-Creation Toolkit: A Guidance on Design, Development, and Implementation
The Co-Creation Toolkit offers comprehensive guidance for effectively integrating co-creation in industry-citizen collaborations. It outlines practical steps for engaging citizens and industry leaders to co-create solutions that meet user needs and address societal challenges. The toolkit covers phases of co-creation from planning and conducting workshops to evaluating outcomes, emphasizing the importance of user involvement, mutual learning, and adapting to both offline and online formats. It provides tools and methods for fostering creativity, structuring information, and understanding user needs, ensuring innovations are socially acceptable and desirable.
Engaged research principles and good practices
Open access features strongly in research ethics but is less well discussed in relation to engagement and impact. This guide suggests that an “open innovation” model should be followed where solutions to societal problems are co-developed transparently with beneficiaries and other relevant parties, creating new relationships or collaborations as part of a broader “open innovation ecosystem” (p. 3). It goes on to argue that “responsible researchers deliver open, transparent and ethical activities across the research and innovation life cycle, responding to feedback from those who have been engaged and involved” (p. 3). It includes an “engaged researcher checklist” which asks “if the research is addressing a societal challenge or issue of public concern, has the research team engaged and involved those stakeholders most affected?”
Minimum quality standards and indicators in community engagement
Although developed for international development practice, UNICEF’s community engagement minimum standards are relevant to research engagement, especially in lower-income contexts. Minimum standards are organized around the principles of participation, empowerment and ownership, inclusion, two-way communication, adaptability, localization, and building on local capacity. Minimum standards are also provided for impact generation activities (“implementation”), which focus on informed design, planning and preparation, managing activities, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.
This book identifies four components of a healthy impact culture, starting with the need to base impacts on rigorous, ethical, and action-oriented research and broadening to principles with associated actions around researcher motivations (or “priorities”), community building, and capacity building.
Research and co-production:
-
Systematically prioritize stakeholders using stakeholder analysis
-
Pro-actively manage risks arising from impact
-
Practice open research
-
Make evidence synthesis more attractive and accessible
Priorities
-
Engage researchers in a coaching process to identify forms of engagement and impact that they might find intrinsically motivating.
-
Organize internal impact-related events that will engage researchers with varying levels of interest and experience with impact.
-
Harness the power of your communications in creative new ways.
Community
-
Create a compassion culture
-
Experiment with more creative stakeholder engagement initiatives
-
Create boundary organizations
-
Co-produce events with your non-academic partners
Capacity
-
Build skills for impact
-
Resource impact
-
Build your learning capacity
-
Do you need an impact strategy?
Principle 2: Engage ethically with all relevant parties.
Engage meaningfully with all relevant parties, including place-based communities, communities of practice, non-academic research partners, and other individuals and groups who may be interested or affected by the research outcomes of the research.
-
Systematically analyze the relative interest, influence, and impacts likely to arise for those who engage with or who might benefit from or be harmed in any way by the research, for example, using an interest-influence-impact (3i) analysis (Reed et al., under review).
-
Establish culturally appropriate and accessible, two-way communication mechanisms with the relevant parties identified, for example, via workshops or advisory groups, to ensure ongoing dialogue, respecting local knowledge, traditions, and cultural contexts.
-
Co-design research, where possible, with those who stand to benefit or lose most from its outcomes, to ensure relevance and usefulness, increasing the likelihood of beneficial impacts from the research.
-
Critically analyze the power (im)balance inherent in how the research is framed, and the extent to which how the work could be driven more fully by those it is engaging and/or intended to benefit, including engagement and impact planning and project governance.
-
Avoid “'ethics dumping”' by maintaining consistent ethical standards across all settings in which impacts may arise from research, particularly in lower-income or vulnerable communities.
-
Co-create an ethics charter with all relevant parties, that outlines the ethical standards expected in the project around engagement and impact.
-
Training and guidance on engagement for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers and all other staff with responsibility for research and/or engagement, including as part of induction processes.
-
Provide evidence-based best practice guidance to underpin training.
-
Create cohorts of local/civic community researchers, for example, via visiting community researcher schemes or funding community researchers to be trained and receive qualifications to work alongside researchers in the institution. See, for example, the University of Staffordshire’s (2024) Connected Communities team, the Scottish Institute for Policing Research’s (2024) Practitioner Fellowships, and the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre’s (2024) Translational Fellowships).
-
Lobby funders to allow , encourage researchers to build “flexible funds” for non-academic groups to apply for and use project funds in self-governed mini-projects that contribute towards the aims of the project, and that are not overly burdensome to spend and account for.
-
Recruit (and appropriately compensate) non-academic ethics reviewers to evaluate applications that include especially high-risk engagement activities.
-
Embark on deeper culture change work, to increase the value placed on ethical engagement by researchers and the need for them to invest in building their capacity in this area.
Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics
This ethical code is comprised of four overarching principles:
-
Seek Truth and Report It (e.g., provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate)
-
Minimize Harm (e.g., consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate)
-
Act Independently (avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts)
-
Be Accountable and Transparent (e.g., respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity, and fairness)
The TRUST Code: A Global Code of Conduct for Equitable Research Partnerships
This guide aims to prevent “ethics dumping” which it defines as “the practice of exporting unethical research practices to lower-income settings” and includes a number of articles relating to the ethics of engagement and impact including:
-
The need to establish the local relevance of research in collaboration with local partners, arguing that “research that is not relevant in the location where it is undertaken imposes burdens without benefits” (p. 2).
-
Engagement with local communities in post-study impact evaluation, ensuring “their perspectives are fairly represented” (p. 2).
-
Dissemination of research findings to local communities “in a way that is meaningful, appropriate and readily comprehended” (p. 2).
-
Where impacts arise from “traditional knowledge,” monetary and non-monetary benefits that might arise should be identified with a “culturally appropriate plan to share benefits…agreed to by all relevant stakeholders.” The planning process for benefit sharing needs to take into account “power and resource differentials…with sustained efforts to bring lower-capacity parties into the dialogue” (p. 2).
This tool enables researchers to identify who is most relevant to engage with, to generate impact in a strategic and inclusive way. It enhances traditional stakeholder analysis by adding 'impact' to the existing 'interest' and 'influence' criteria. This approach aims to identify and prioritize all relevant parties, especially marginalized groups, in decision-making processes. It proposes a typology of eight types of relevant parties and suggests adapting engagement strategies based on their interests, influences, and potential impacts.
This guide on community engagement with research (based on the TRUST Code below) encourages researchers to ask questions based on four values:
-
“Fairness: How are the communities meaningfully involved in discussions about the aims of the research, including why it is needed and who will benefit?
-
Honesty: Have all background details been shared and discussed with the community, including the funding situation and the intentions of the researchers?; What procedures will be used for two-way, open communication?; What procedures are in place to ensure understanding of research issues without being patronising?; What promises are being made to the community and can they be fulfilled?
-
Respect: How are community preferences for engagement strategies being discussed and acted upon?; Are the relevant community spokespersons or representatives being consulted?; Is permission from community elders/leaders or representatives needed for this consultation?; How are the research team familiarising themselves with local culture – including organizational structures, history, traditions, relationship with the environment, and sensitivities?
-
Care: How are local needs and the potential for capacity building being taken into account in development of the aims? Is due attention being paid to the impact of the study and the study team upon the participants, their families, the local community and the environment?” (p. 19).
It also provides guidance on:
-
Planning for dissemination of sensitive or controversial findings, especially with vulnerable groups, to avoid altering power dynamics within communities, exacerbating conflicts, or creating stigmatization or discrimination; and
-
The ethics of evaluating research impact, suggesting that in the context of community engagement, “research without any perceived benefits is unethical,” if communities have invested resources in the research. It suggests communities should be involved in impact evaluations, giving them credit for their input, and letting them define criteria for evaluating whether or not beneficial impacts have occurred from their perspective (rather than the perspective of researchers or funders). Where adverse impacts are identified, the need for a transparent approach to resolving complaints is emphasized.
This guide for researchers seeing to work with Māori groups is relevant to researchers working with similar groups elsewhere. The research focused on how “non-indigenous scientists embrace the geographical, cultural, and social places they find themselves as manuhiri (guests).” In this sense, being a guest is not limited to geographic location; it can also be applied to metaphorical and conceptual places, stemming from the knowledges associated with indigenous peoples. That is, it can be applied to real, imagined, and conceptual spaces. Nine indicators can help non-indigenous researchers navigate the co-production of knowledge and practices. The term “methodological sensitivities” invites an embodied collective responsiveness by researchers and their collaborators (and funders) to the knowledge systems, situations, aspirations, challenges, and invitations. 10 attributes were identified for researchers to engage appropriately with Māori, and 10 principles and guidelines for engagement with Māori are also identified.
Guidance Ethics Approach: An ethical dialogue about technology with perspective on actions
This framework for integrating ethical considerations into the development and use of technology emphasizes the interconnectedness of technology and society. It proposes a process that includes understanding the context of technology, engaging in dialogues about its effects and values with beneficiaries, and formulating actionable strategies for ethical implementation. This approach helps ensure technologies align with societal values, fostering responsible innovation and ethical technology integration.
Integrated research “involves a diversity of people contributing to a project. These diverse contributions might be different knowledges, understandings of a problem, concepts, frameworks, data, methods, skills, or interpretations. They can come from a wide range of domains including the humanities, mātauranga Māori, government, law, industry, community, business, creative arts, as well as within the sciences.” In this sense, integration refers to bringing into research a diverse range of individuals and groups who might be affected by, interested in, or influential over the outcomes resulting from the research. The integrated research toolkit includes a selection of tools and associated frameworks that can be used to explore how to ensure the realization of beneficial impact and negate the realization of harmful impact.
OM is a methodology for planning and assessing project impact. “It has been developed with international development in mind and can also be applied to projects (or programme) relating to research, communication, policy influence and research uptake.” OM is based on five key assumptions including the following.
-
“People contribute to their own wellbeing; there are no passive beneficiaries. People’s wellbeing includes agency - the knowledge and power to play a role in creating, maintaining, assessing or adjusting the actions that affect them and ecosystems on which life depends. People who have no influence over the programmes reaching them are not being helped.”
-
“Differing yet equally valid perspectives will always coexist. Actors will interpret things depending on their particular stake in a situation. The ways in which these stakeholders are motivated and act may differ and may not be consistent or supportive of each other. Engaging the relevant actors while recognizing, reconciling or managing their differing impetuses for involvement is a normal part of an intervention.”
-
“Ecological, social and economic resilience depend on interrelationships. Sustainable improvements in wellbeing involve influencing interconnected contributions from a variety of political, social and economic actors. The engagement of these actors in appropriate interconnected patterns of behavior is essential in building the capacity of stakeholders to maintain or adjust their contributions as conditions change, as needs emerge, and as the actors themselves evolve.”
What is good practice engagement and impact?
This guide builds on the three preceding sources (above) to propose nine good practice principles for engagement and impact:
-
Understand your purpose and pursue impacts you find intrinsically motivating rather than allowing extrinsic incentives to drive your engagement
-
Understand your context so you can engage with empathy, inclusivity and sensitivity
-
Where relevant, co-design your engagement and impact
-
Draw on robust and open evidence
-
Monitor, evaluate, learn and be accountable
-
Build your skills and confidence and support each other in your engagement and impact
-
Consider and manage the ethics and risks of engagement and impact
-
Strategically plan and resource your engagement and impact
-
Understand and manage power dynamics and your own positionality
This book identifies four components of a healthy impact culture, starting with the need to base impacts on rigorous, ethical, and action-oriented research and broadening to principles with associated actions around researcher motivations (or “priorities”), community building, and capacity building.
Research and co-production:
-
Systematically prioritize stakeholders using stakeholder analysis
-
Pro-actively manage risks arising from impact
-
Practice open research
-
Make evidence synthesis more attractive and accessible
Priorities
-
Engage researchers in a coaching process to identify forms of engagement and impact that they might find intrinsically motivating.
-
Organize internal impact-related events that will engage researchers with varying levels of interest and experience with impact.
-
Harness the power of your communications in creative new ways.
Community
-
Create a compassion culture
-
Experiment with more creative stakeholder engagement initiatives
-
Create boundary organizations
-
Co-produce events with your non-academic partners
Capacity
-
Build skills for impact
-
Resource impact
-
Build your learning capacity
-
Do you need an impact strategy?
Principle 3: Manage risk and reduce the potential for harm.
Proactively identify, assess, and attempt to mitigate potential risks and negative impacts arising from research and engagement, both during and after the completion of research.
-
Use interest-influence-impact analysis to identify at-risk groups, engaging with these and other relevant parties to identify potential risks and associated mitigation strategies. Working with these groups, the widest possible range of future scenarios should be identified in which the research could potentially create risks or cause harm, both during and after the completion of the research.
-
Plan for the monitoring of risks and harm during and after projects, where possible, building this into funding proposals and considering the dynamics of impact over multiple time frames.
-
Monitor foreseen risks and harm while being alert to the possibility of new and emerging risks and harm throughout the project, with clear protocols for addressing issues as they arise.
-
Make all relevant parties aware of institutional complaints procedures so they can report risks and negative impacts. Alternatively, these procedures may be created and managed at the project level.
-
Use risk assessment to take into account uncertainties, support decision-making and guide the research impact strategy.
-
Enable researchers to quickly and easily identify engagement and impact plans that may be high risk, for example, via an online survey tool, giving automatic ethics approval to low-risk activities, conditional approval to medium-risk activities as long as researchers engage with relevant training and guidance, and only referring the highest risk activities to ethics committees.
-
Where necessary, provide access to ethics experts to help researchers adapt their research and engagement strategies to avoid and manage risk appropriately.
-
Enable monitoring of risks and harm after the completion of projects, to ensure monitoring does not stop when project-based funding for this activity ends.
-
Establish mechanisms that enable for local communities, non-academic partners, and other relevant parties to report risks or negative impacts they observe or experience. Moreover, make researchers aware of these processes so that, so they can be promoted to all relevant parties.
-
Organize periodic institutional learning exercises with key partners, where they meet with and respond to the experience these partners have in engaging with researchers and the institution.
Guidance note: Potential misuse of research
This guidance recognizes that “some research…could be misused for unethical purposes [and] has the potential to harm humans, animals or the environment.” It provides guidance on ways of minimizing negative unintended impacts from research “by recognising risks in good time and taking the right precautions.”
How to complete your ethics self-assessment for EU Grants
Most research funders provide guidance around research that could be used to compromise national security, where it falls into the hands of criminals or terrorists. Horizon Europe also provides guidance on the potential misuse of research for unethical purposes. It identifies research activities particularly vulnerable to misuse, such as surveillance development and genetic profiling technologies. It provides questions to help identify potential unethical uses and mitigation measures, including changes to the research design, limiting dissemination, and working with ethics experts.
This guideline is supplemented by instruction focused on “Identifying serious and complex ethics issues in EU-funded research” as well as a series of notes with domain-specific guidelines related to the fields such as: dual use items; potential misuse of research results; focus exclusively on civil applications; research on refugees, asylum seekers and migrants; data protection; ethics in social science and humanities; ethics in ethnography/anthropology; and ethics by design and ethics of use approaches for artificial intelligence.
Trusted research: guidance for academics
“Trusted research” is designed to protect intellectual property, sensitive research, people and infrastructure from theft, manipulation and exploitation, including by hostile actors. This guidance helps researchers protect their intellectual property and manage risks in international collaborations and cybersecurity. This includes questions to vet potential research partners, the use of legal frameworks and contracts, and compliance with export controls, for example when exporting technologies overseas.
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Self‐Reflection Tool
This tool asks researchers to consider the different values, interests, and ideals of the relevant parties they engage with, how they can prevent potentially harmful impacts on the public or the environment, and identify strategies for preventing adverse outcomes from their research (in the ethics section) and how to include people with different genders, ethnicities, classes, ages, routines, experience or level of power (in the public engagement section).
The SATORI CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA 17145)
Part 2 of the agreement is an ethical impact assessment framework designed to help researchers anticipate and ethically assess research and innovation’s social and environmental consequences. The approach combines ethics assessment, impact assessment, and technology assessment.
This tool helps researchers assess the societal readiness level of their research, asking reflective questions “intended to aid identification and accounting for key societal dimensions of innovation at different stages of a project” (p. 5). It is designed to complement Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) by addressing broader societal concerns. The tool provides reflective questions at various stages of a project's lifecycle, encouraging researchers to consider societal implications, engage with beneficiaries, and adapt their work based on feedback. It promotes responsible research and innovation by facilitating early-stage identification of societal impacts and fostering continuous, iterative learning throughout the research process.
The TechEthos Societal Readiness Tool
This tool helps researchers keep track of the societal readiness level of their research defined as “the degree to which a product can be trusted to fulfil its intended benefits within a real-world social setting while adhering to ethical principles, preventing adverse societal impacts and being governed as needed by robust legal frameworks” (p. 1). It encourages researchers to consider the ethical implications of their research during design, implementation and use “allowing users to make their own judgements about how effectively their products prevent possible negative societal effects while delivering intended benefits” (p. 1).
Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Although developed specifically to manage the ethics around impacts from artificial intelligence research, many of the principles are relevant more broadly to avoid negative unintended impacts from research:
-
Risk assessments should be carried out to identify potential harm that could arise from the research, avoiding unwanted harms where possible (rather than just managing them).
-
The right to privacy should be respected in engagement and impact processes as much as they are in the research process.
-
National and international law should be respected, and to ensure sensitivity to cultural contexts, advice should be sought from a diverse cross-section of society on how to manage sensitive and controversial impacts.
-
Negative impacts on sustainability arising from research should be assessed in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and avoided.
-
Capacity building may be necessary to enable relevant parties to engage sufficiently with the work to help researchers identify and manage risks.
Ethical OS Toolkit - a guide to anticipating the future impact of today’s technology
This toolkit is designed to help those developing technologies identify potential risks from unexpected uses and find ways of mitigating these risks. It includes a checklist of eight risk zones to help identify emerging areas of risk and social harm, alongside scenarios and future-proofing strategies.
Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics
This ethical code is comprised of four overarching principles:
-
Seek Truth and Report It (e.g., provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate)
-
Minimize Harm (e.g., consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate)
-
Act Independently (avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts)
-
Be Accountable and Transparent (e.g., respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity, and fairness)
SIENNA Ethical Guidance for Research with Potential for Human Enhancement
This guidance provides comprehensive recommendations for conducting research related to human enhancement technologies. It addresses key ethical issues such as autonomy, health and safety, fairness, equality, informed consent, and privacy. The guidance emphasizes a multidisciplinary approach and the importance of considering long-term societal impacts. It includes practical steps for ethical assessment and mitigation strategies, aiming to ensure that enhancement technologies are developed and applied responsibly and ethically.
Consequence Scanning: An Agile Event for Responsible Innovators
Consequence scanning is typically used in product or technology development contexts, but can be applied to research impact. It asks three questions: “1. What are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or feature? 2. What are the positive consequences we want to focus on? 3. What are the consequences we want to mitigate?” (p. 9). Questions are typically answered in workshops by expert participants who are able to identify actions to mitigate risks which can be monitored in a consequence scanning log.
Principle 4: Seek to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion in engagement and impact.
Ensure equitable, diverse, and inclusive engagement by systematically assessing and addressing barriers to engagement by all relevant parties.
-
Systematically consider and include diverse genders, ethnicities, ages, and other demographic factors in the engagement process to ensure that all voices are heard, valued, and considered equally.
-
Making deliberate efforts to proactively identify and remove barriers by taking appropriate actions, enabling everyone to engage equally.
-
Adapt engagement processes, communication channels, and approaches to be inclusive, accessible to and meet the needs of different groups, based on an analysis of their interests, influence, and impact (see Principle 2 above)
-
Develop actionable and measurable equity, diversity and inclusion delivery plan.
-
Embed EDI in research culture by dDeveloping policies and processes that enable and reward diversity and inclusivity in research projects, both pre-award and post-award, ensuring that they are reflected in every aspect of projects funded in the institution.
-
Provide necessary resources including internal funding and training to all team members on cultural awareness and assure competence to respect cultural diversity, which is necessary to enhance researcher effectiveness in diverse settings.
EU Code of practice on citizen-engagement
The Code covers social inclusion, diversity and gender equality, ensuring the engagement of all target groups and addressing barriers to participation.
What is good practice engagement and impact?
This guide builds on the three preceding sources (above) to propose nine good practice principles for engagement and impact:
-
Understand your purpose and pursue impacts you find intrinsically motivating rather than allowing extrinsic incentives to drive your engagement
-
Understand your context so you can engage with empathy, inclusivity and sensitivity
-
Where relevant, co-design your engagement and impact
-
Draw on robust and open evidence
-
Monitor, evaluate, learn and be accountable
-
Build your skills and confidence and support each other in your engagement and impact
-
Consider and manage the ethics and risks of engagement and impact
-
Strategically plan and resource your engagement and impact
-
Understand and manage power dynamics and your own positionality
This guide helps designers “be aware of the context and broader impact of any design and strive to effect a beneficial impact beyond the intended beneficiary of the design.” It includes guidance on designing for uncertainty and integrating accessibility activities and tools to help avoid harm and ensure positive impacts.
UK Standards for Public Involvement
Impact is one of six areas in this standard and to meet the standard it is necessary to answer the following questions:
-
“Are the public involved in deciding what the assessment of impact should focus on and the approach to take?
-
Is it clear what information to collect to help assess impact, including who has been involved and how?
-
Are there processes in place to help reflect on public involvement?
-
Are the changes, benefits and learning resulting from public involvement acted on?” (p. 9)
Engaged research principles and good practices
Open access features strongly in research ethics but is less well discussed in relation to engagement and impact. This guide suggests that an “open innovation” model should be followed where solutions to societal problems are co-developed transparently with beneficiaries and other relevant parties, creating new relationships or collaborations as part of a broader “open innovation ecosystem” (p. 3). It goes on to argue that “responsible researchers deliver open, transparent and ethical activities across the research and innovation life cycle, responding to feedback from those who have been engaged and involved” (p. 3). It includes an “engaged researcher checklist” which asks “if the research is addressing a societal challenge or issue of public concern, has the research team engaged and involved those stakeholders most affected?”
Ethical Research in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Contexts: Guidelines for Applicants
UKRI has guidance on ethical engagement and impact for researchers working in vulnerable contexts, including:
-
“Criteria 5: Research plan demonstrates systematic consideration of ethics during dissemination phase.” This includes the co-production of dissemination plans to ensure research is not used to disadvantage vulnerable groups or increase inequalities, ensuring dissemination of research protects and does not harm those who engage, and creating equitable benefits at different scales, including locally.
-
“Criteria 6: Research plan demonstrates systematic consideration of ethics during monitoring and evaluation of the research.” This emphasizes monitoring and evaluating both positive and negative, as well as intentional and unintentional outcomes from research, ensuring ongoing risk assessment and mitigation. It includes the inclusion of “meaningful post-research evaluation to evaluate how ethics were addressed and to evaluate research impact” and underlines feeding back evaluation findings to affected groups. Although the guidance does not explicitly state whether evaluation should occur within or beyond project timeframes, it notes the need to explicitly plan for and fund the evaluation of engagement and impact.
Guidelines for good practice in evaluation
This guidance focuses on the evaluation with a number of ethical principles relevant to the evaluation of impact including:
-
“Integrity: The practice of evaluation should demonstrate responsibility to participants according to agreed ethical principles and assure the veracity and validity of the findings.
-
Independence: Evaluations should be independent of vested interests and power differences.
-
Accessibility: Findings of evaluations should be available in the public domain and communicable to agreed audiences.
-
Trust: No evaluation can effectively proceed without trust, which needs to be developed and nurtured through agreed ethical procedures for conduct and reporting that are fair and just to all.
-
Equity: The conduct of evaluation should respect the perspectives and human dignity of all participants and stakeholders irrespective of their position in professional contexts or social structures.
-
Transparency: The principles underlying an evaluation, its approach, ethical practices, limitations and uses should be made explicit to all stakeholders
-
Diversity: Evaluation should respect cultural, gender and age differences, and strive to include all relevant standpoints including those of the traditionally disenfranchised, marginalized or hard to reach” (p. 1)
Here, the authors advocate for an ‘emerging dialogue’ concerning both anticipations of impact and inclusion of ‘others.’ “Anticipation involves contemplation of the potential futures research and innovation can create… [while] also acknowledging inseparable connections to the past… Furthermore, it is crucial to reflect on who anticipates consequences of research and innovation and to what end”. They go on to state that: “Inclusion refers to incorporating diverse people, worldviews, values, and knowledges… Fostering inclusive practices within Australia and Aotearoa should then go beyond exercises in generic consultation and elicitation, which can manifest not only as inadequate but potentially extractive engagement practices… realising the potential of forms of inclusion that go beyond generic, or even extractive, engagements requires dedicated infrastructures and mechanisms to better support Indigenous- and minority-led research and innovation.”
Principle 5: Maintain accountability and evaluate engagement and impact.
Commit to accountability and continuous learning, engaging those affected by the research in evaluatingthe evaluation of engagement and impact, and using findings to enhance engagement and impact practice within and beyond the institution.
-
Plan for evaluations of engagement and research impact, working with affected groups where relevant and appropriate, to establish clear, measurable impact goals
-
Evaluate engagement and impact with reference to relevant parties’ expectations, including assessing how ethical considerations were addressed.
-
Provide regular feedback on progress towards impact goals, challenges, and ultimate outcomes as they arise.
-
Where possible, involve independent evaluators and/or those affected by the research to assess the project’s impact.
-
Provide ongoing support for researchers to evaluate their engagement and impact, and learn lessons for their own practice.
-
Establish mechanisms to share lessons from evaluating engagement and impact across the institution, where possible, joining sector-wide initiatives to exchange learning.
-
Ensure the burden of evaluation is proportionate to the scale of engagement and impact.
-
Provide resources for evaluation, including for independent evaluation, where this activity is not funded in projects and for post-project evaluation.
Assessing Value for Money: the Oxford Policy Management Approach
The Value for Money/Value For Investment approach “is intended to guide evaluators in combining multiple values and kinds of evidence, to help people make warranted evaluative judgements. It neither prescribes nor proscribes what values should be included, rather it positions evaluation as inclusive and impartial.” The associated 5ES framework includes the concept of “equity,” which involves exploring how fairly benefits are distributed and to what extent our work is reaching marginalized groups.
Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics
This ethical code is comprised of four overarching principles: Seek Truth and Report It (e.g. provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate) Minimize Harm (e.g. consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate) Act Independently (avoid conflicts of interest real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts) Be Accountable and Transparent (e.g. respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness)
The TRUST Code: A Global Code of Conduct for Equitable Research Partnerships
This book guides researchers in thinking more deliberately about choices they make during the research process that can lead to (positive or negative) societal impact. Choices include - what questions to ask, who to ask them with, where to do research (over- and under-researched communities), who should participate in data collection, who can evaluate research and for what purposes, and how and with whom to communicate about the results of the research. The book has free online flowcharts to help guide researchers through these questions.
Guidelines for good practice in evaluation
This guidance focuses on the evaluation with a number of ethical principles relevant to the evaluation of impact including:
-
“Integrity: The practice of evaluation should demonstrate responsibility to participants according to agreed ethical principles and assure the veracity and validity of the findings.
-
Independence: Evaluations should be independent of vested interests and power differences.
-
Accessibility: Findings of evaluations should be available in the public domain and communicable to agreed audiences.
-
Trust: No evaluation can effectively proceed without trust, which needs to be developed and nurtured through agreed ethical procedures for conduct and reporting that are fair and just to all.
-
Equity: The conduct of evaluation should respect the perspectives and human dignity of all participants and stakeholders irrespective of their position in professional contexts or social structures.
-
Transparency: The principles underlying an evaluation, its approach, ethical practices, limitations and uses should be made explicit to all stakeholders
-
Diversity: Evaluation should respect cultural, gender and age differences, and strive to include all relevant standpoints including those of the traditionally disenfranchised, marginalized or hard to reach” (p. 1)
Responsible innovation self-check tool
The COMPASS tool promotes responsible innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through a self-assessment framework. It features a multiple-choice questionnaire that evaluates practices across four management sections: company management, idea generation, development and testing, and market and impact. The tool helps SMEs understand and implement responsible innovation by offering actionable insights and benchmarking against peers. It emphasizes organizational learning and practical application, guiding users through responsible innovation dimensions and suggesting practical improvements based on their responses.
This includes the principle that knowledge exchange should be achieved by “working transparently and ethically” via published strategies that identify relevant goals and beneficiaries and “published mechanisms…to assure the ethical integrity and quality of…knowledge exchange” (no page number).
MULTI-ACT Collective Research Impact Framework
This framework provides a structured approach to evaluate and enhance the impact of multi-stakeholder health research initiatives. It introduces a multidimensional impact assessment model that integrates scientific excellence, economic performance, social impact, patient-reported outcomes, and mission effectiveness. The framework emphasizes engagement, particularly involving patients, to co-create research agendas and assess impact comprehensively. It includes tools such as the Master Scorecard for monitoring progress and a digital toolbox for managing engagement and data collection.
Ethical Research in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Contexts: Guidelines for Applicants
UKRI has guidance on ethical engagement and impact for researchers working in vulnerable contexts, including:
-
“Criteria 5: Research plan demonstrates systematic consideration of ethics during dissemination phase.” This includes the co-production of dissemination plans to ensure research is not used to disadvantage vulnerable groups or increase inequalities, ensuring dissemination of research protects and does not harm those who engage, and creating equitable benefits at different scales, including locally.
-
“Criteria 6: Research plan demonstrates systematic consideration of ethics during monitoring and evaluation of the research.” This emphasizes monitoring and evaluating both positive and negative, as well as intentional and unintentional outcomes from research, ensuring ongoing risk assessment and mitigation. It includes the inclusion of “meaningful post-research evaluation to evaluate how ethics were addressed and to evaluate research impact” and underlines feeding back evaluation findings to affected groups. Although the guidance does not explicitly state whether evaluation should occur within or beyond project timeframes, it notes the need to explicitly plan for and fund the evaluation of engagement and impact.
AAL Guidelines for Ethics, Data Privacy and Security
These guidelines provide a comprehensive framework for ensuring ethical excellence in the development and deployment of digital solutions aimed at active and healthy ageing. They integrate compliance with legal standards like GDPR and the Medical Device Regulation with a continuous ethical dialogue involving stakeholders. The guidelines cover phases from conceptualization to market entry, emphasizing user involvement, data protection, and the development of ethically robust technologies. They aim to address ethical challenges and enhance the acceptability and success of digital solutions by fostering trust and meeting high ethical standards.
European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity
Although mainly focused on research ethics, the Code includes principles such as “honesty in reporting and communicating research in a transparent, fair, full and unbiased way” “respect for society, ecosystems, cultural heritage and the environment” and “accountability…for…wider societal impacts.”
This guide to ethical impact analysis (EIA) has six steps:
-
Conduct an EIA threshold analysis
-
Formulate an EIA plan
-
Identify the ethical impacts
-
Evaluate the ethical impacts
-
Formulate and implement remedial actions
-
Review and audit the EIA outcomes
Research impact privacy notice
A privacy notice that explains how Nottingham Trent University collects, stores, and uses evidence of the impact of its research. This could be adapted for use across the sector to increase transparency around impact data collection.
Principle 6: Design for lasting impact.
Design research with a long-term perspective, aiming for lasting impacts, where possible, maintaining flexibility to adapt to unforeseen barriers and opportunities, changes in the project’s context, and emerging ethical concerns.
-
Integrate legacy planning into the project’s initial design. This should include plans for post-project maintenance, support, and funding.
-
Work with non-academic partners to develop their ability to continue the project’s initiatives after the research phase has ended (see Principle 1).
-
Plan for long-term studies to track the project’s impact years after its completion, adjusting strategies based on those findings to maximize long-term benefits.
-
Incorporate regular review points in the research process to assess the need for methodological adjustments or to address new ethical issues.
-
Support adaptive research practices through flexible funding and project timelines, and establish mechanisms to respond quickly to necessary changes in research protocols.
-
Incentivize and support long-term engagement with non-academic partners by researchers between funded projects.
-
Dedicate internal funding to legacy initiatives, integrating across projects where possible to maximize impact and cost-effectiveness.
This book identifies four components of a healthy impact culture, starting with the need to base impacts on rigorous, ethical, and action-oriented research and broadening to principles with associated actions around researcher motivations (or “priorities”), community building, and capacity building.
Research and co-production:
-
Systematically prioritize stakeholders using stakeholder analysis
-
Pro-actively manage risks arising from impact
-
Practice open research
-
Make evidence synthesis more attractive and accessible
Priorities
-
Engage researchers in a coaching process to identify forms of engagement and impact that they might find intrinsically motivating.
-
Organize internal impact-related events that will engage researchers with varying levels of interest and experience with impact.
-
Harness the power of your communications in creative new ways.
Community
-
Create a compassion culture
-
Experiment with more creative stakeholder engagement initiatives
-
Create boundary organizations
-
Co-produce events with your non-academic partners
Capacity
-
Build skills for impact
-
Resource impact
-
Build your learning capacity
-
Do you need an impact strategy?
Ten principles of high quality engagement
-
Understand your purpose and your context
-
Consider carefully the people you hope to involve in your engagement work and the role of equality, diversity, and inclusion in your approach
-
Design your approach with your purpose and people in mind, and where possible, involve others in the design phase
-
Use evaluation strategically, and make sure you use it to reflect on your work and with your team
-
Anticipate, explore, and manage the ethical implications of your work and ensure that you do no harm
-
Plan and resource your work appropriately, getting help where needed. Be sure you have expert administrative support.
-
If you work in partnership with others, take good practice partnership principles into your work
-
Reflect on the power dynamics in your work and address these appropriately
-
Consider if and how you will sustain your work and manage the expectations of those involved
-
Work with others with relevant knowledge, networks, and expertise – this could be public engagement professionals within your institution or partnering organization
OM is a methodology for planning and assessing project impact. “It has been developed with international development in mind and can also be applied to projects (or programme) relating to research, communication, policy influence and research uptake.” OM is based on five key assumptions including the following.
-
“People contribute to their own wellbeing; there are no passive beneficiaries. People’s wellbeing includes agency - the knowledge and power to play a role in creating, maintaining, assessing or adjusting the actions that affect them and ecosystems on which life depends. People who have no influence over the programmes reaching them are not being helped.”
-
“Differing yet equally valid perspectives will always coexist. Actors will interpret things depending on their particular stake in a situation. The ways in which these stakeholders are motivated and act may differ and may not be consistent or supportive of each other. Engaging the relevant actors while recognizing, reconciling or managing their differing impetuses for involvement is a normal part of an intervention.”
-
“Ecological, social and economic resilience depend on interrelationships. Sustainable improvements in wellbeing involve influencing interconnected contributions from a variety of political, social and economic actors. The engagement of these actors in appropriate interconnected patterns of behavior is essential in building the capacity of stakeholders to maintain or adjust their contributions as conditions change, as needs emerge, and as the actors themselves evolve.”
This tool also helps researchers assess the societal readiness level of their research, asking reflective questions “intended to aid identification and accounting for key societal dimensions of innovation at different stages of a project” (p. 5). It is designed to complement Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) by addressing broader societal concerns. The tool provides reflective questions at various stages of a project's lifecycle, encouraging researchers to consider societal implications, engage with stakeholders, and adapt their work based on feedback. It promotes responsible research and innovation by facilitating early-stage identification of societal impacts and fostering continuous, iterative learning throughout the research process.
The authors propose “a Waka-Taurua [a double hulled canoe] as a metaphorical framework for facilitating the development of collaborative initiatives”. They explain that “systems which recognise Indigenous worldviews, tools and approaches equitably with ecosystem based management can be developed using this framework.” Multiple new and existing concepts such as “two-eyed seeing” and the “negotiated space” are introduced. While the metaphor is enabling and aspirational (an indigenous canoe lashed to a western rowboat with a bridge or deck between the two representing the negotiated third space) the reality of Aotearoa New Zealand’s research science and innovation system has been likened to an indigenous canoe lashed to a supertanker “because of the pervasiveness of how institutions and systems are built around and dictated by Western ways of thinking and doing.”
Standard Operating Procedures for Research Integrity (SOPs4RI)
The SOPs4RI tool provides guidelines for promoting research integrity. It emphasizes developing, implementing, and maintaining a Research Integrity Promotion Plan (RIPP), which includes policies and procedures for fostering an ethical research environment. Key topics addressed in a RIPP include research environment, supervision and mentoring, research integrity training, data practices, research collaboration, publication and communication, declaration of interests, and handling breaches of integrity. The tool aims to create a supportive research culture by addressing issues like hyper-competition and promoting transparency, diversity, and inclusion.
This research was funded by Plymouth University’s Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Accelerator Account.
