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Transformative Research Assessment: Integrating Societal Impacts into Evaluation Frameworks
No full textGlobal crises and growing public scrutiny are prompting research systems to demonstrate how they contribute to societal well-being, not just academic excellence. This white paper from the CoARA Towards Transformations Societal Impact subgroup argues that societal impact should be a core dimension of research assessment, culture, and funding. Drawing on literature, existing national and institutional frameworks, and the experience of more than twenty members across countries and disciplines, we clarify key terms, map current approaches, and propose practical ways forward. We define societal impacts as the evidenced contributions of research to improvements beyond academia and examine why these impacts are challenging to plan for, document, and evaluate in a fair manner. We review how funders and organisations are designing calls, impact planning tools, and evaluation methods, and how these shape incentives for engagement and co-creation with societal knowledge partners. Building on this analysis, we outline six guiding principles for integrating societal impact into assessment, as well as three system enablers related to capabilities, research ecosystems, and iterative learning. For funders, institutions, evaluators, and researchers, we provide role-specific recommendations that balance accountability with learning, protecting academic freedom, research diversity, and fostering long-term, transformative change. The paper aims to support CoARA members and the wider research community in aligning reforms and building a shared, plural understanding of research value. The paper contributes to the CoARA Commitment No. 1, Recognize the diversity of contributions to, and careers in, research in accordance with the needs and nature of the research, and No. 2, Base research assessment primarily on qualitative evaluation for which peer review is central, supported by responsible use of quantitative indicators.</p
De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society
No full textThe De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society explores how digitalization is reconfiguring practices of health and medicine. Digitalisation requires health and medical practices to address and utilise the interrelated challenges posed by increased quantification (e.g., data-intensive medicine), ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., remote access to care providers), and the unprecedented power of algorithms (e.g., communicative AI). Developing important social scientific analyses of the contemporary sociotechnical configuration of health knowledge, therapeutic relationships and medical decision-making, the handbook puts forward theories and methods to inform the development, implementation and governance of Digital Health. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for shaping desirable futures in health and care.</p
Anti-heroines and Oman’s revolutionary afterlives
No full textImages of female fighters in liberation movements from the global south have a wide appeal as symbols of radical social emancipation and iconic revolutionary heroines. But what happens to these women when revolution meets with military defeat? In Oman, an anti-colonial revolutionary liberation front, founded in 1965, soon became renowned for its female fighters. By contrast, British-led counterinsurgency forces imposed conservative gender norms – and after the counterinsurgency’s victory in 1976, women of revolutionary backgrounds in postwar Oman acquired a reputation for conservativism. Nevertheless, these women’s postwar lives indicate how they still found ways to challenge restrictive gender norms. Their ongoing commitment to emancipatory values shows how revolutions go on to have lasting afterlives. These revolutionary afterlives problematise a gaze that assumes that a particular kind of heroine most embodies “liberation”, and recast the women who seemingly appear to be the antithesis of that liberation from heroines to anti-heroines.</p
Green transition for whom? Garment production networks and the politics of climate crisis in Bangladesh
No full textThe global apparel industry faces increasing pressure to enact a ‘green transition’ by adopting sustainability standards around carbon emissions, water use, and waste. This article explores how new environmental regulations affect global production networks (GPNs), focusing on Bangladeshi producers exporting to Europe. Using a multi-scalar ethnographic approach, we demonstrate that the apparel industry’s green transition is profoundly shaped by discourses of environmental and climate ‘crisis,’ but that network actors perceive and experience crisis differently. We argue that the politics of crisis, rather than crisis itself, drives the apparel industry’s green transition, replicating power asymmetries within GPNs and broader capitalist geographies.</p
India’s economy carries its momentum into 2026
No full textIndia’s economy grew steadily in 2025, with real GDP expanding close to 7 per cent despite global trade tensions. Growth has been broad-based, driven by rural consumption, government expenditure, resilient exports and modernisation across services and infrastructure. Looking ahead, sustainability will depend on continued progress in infrastructure modernisation, while carefully managing debt, the energy transition, trade diversification and poverty reduction. With these challenges effectively addressed, India is well positioned to maintain its strong growth momentum.</p
Implementation of family integrated care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, University Hospitals Sussex, UK
No full textBackground/Objectives: Family Integrated Care (FICare) is a model of care for preterm or critically ill infants in which families are considered equal partners with clinical teams and are fully integrated into all aspects of care and decision-making. In this study, we conducted a health economics study of FICare implementation in the UK, as part of the EU-funded international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral project RISEinFamily. Methods: An economic evaluation of healthcare services and an audit of clinical outcomes for infants admitted to the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital neonatal units in 2021 (at the start of FICare) and 2024 (when FICare was fully integrated into clinical practice) were conducted. Anonymized data on hospital admissions were downloaded from the hospital database. Infants with a duration of stay in the NICU of more than 20 days were included in the analysis. The cost of NICU stay was estimated using the Health Resource Group codes. Results: The average duration of infants’ stay in NICU was similar before and after the implementation of FICare (47 days (SD 29) in 2021 and 47 days (SD 31) in 2024). However, the infants who received FICare spent fewer days in high-dependency care; on average, 10 days in 2024 and 13 days in 2021. The duration of invasive ventilation fell by 12% and the duration of CPAP by 26% after introducing FICare. The total cost per baby stay in NICU was GBP 63,279 (USD 87,021) in 2021 and GBP 59,284 (USD 75,777) in 2024. Conclusions: Although the changes did not reach statistical significance, the study suggests that FICare may be resource- and cost-saving due to reducing infants’ stays in high-dependency care.</p
Sources of bias in general linear models: evaluating the analytic practice in psychological research
No full textUnbiased estimation and hypothesis testing in General Linear Models requires several conditions to be met, such as adherence to statistical assumptions and absence of influential data points. This study examined the extent to which researchers in psychology attend to these sources of bias when presented with analytic tasks. We recruited 188 psychology researchers who completed two data analytic scenarios. Researchers’ analytic scripts and descriptions were subsequently coded based on their level of attentiveness to issues with non-normal model errors, heteroscedasticity, outliers, and influential cases. We found that for all categories, researchers either performed no checks for potential issues or performed checks that were insufficient to detect the issue at hand. Researchers who teach research methods were more likely to perform the correct checks than non-teaching faculty, post-doctoral researchers and Ph.D. students, however this difference was small and the highest posterior density intervals overlapped substantially. We discuss the implications of
routinely neglecting violated assumptions and influential cases, and present the case for more frequent application of robust statistical methods to supplement or replace ordinary least squares general linear models.</p
Sensory reactivity and intolerance to uncertainty: what characterises demand avoidance behaviours in children and adolescents with pathological demand avoidance?
No full textThe present study addressed the underlying factors contributing to Extreme Demand Avoidance (EDA) behaviours in autistic children and adolescents with and without Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). Data from 795 children between the ages of 4-17 years old were analysed. Parents of 475 of autistic children and adolescents + PDA, 171 autistic children, and 94 neurotypical children completed an online composite questionnaire consisting of the characteristics of EDA, autism, anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and sensory processing patterns. The findings showed that higher levels of anxiety and autism corresponded to higher EDA behaviours for all three groups. While IU and sensory reactivity were not found to be associated with EDA in the autism group; higher levels of IU corresponded with higher levels of EDA for the neurotypical controls. Importantly, this was the first study to illustrate higher levels of sensory reactivity, namely sensory sensitivity and sensory seeking, to uniquely characterise EDA in the children and adolescents identifying with autism + PDA. It is suggested that significant sensory reactivity may play a major role in the ability to undertake and/or in the avoidance of certain demands and situations for children with a PDA. Understanding the key underlying mechanisms behind EDA behaviours, could lead to a strengths-based approach, tailoring more comprehensive management strategies for autistic children with PDA, including those that address environmental sensory demands.</p
A geography of access to justice: mapping social welfare legal aid need and provision in England and Wales
No full textOur research combined statistical data, interviews and Geographical Information System (GIS) tools to map social welfare legal aid deserts in England and Wales. This novel mixed methodology enabled us to explore the spatiality of unmet legal need. We show that provision may be spatially uneven even where provider offices do exist, indicating that some legal desert areas have gone unidentified (absolute shortage), that contracted offices may not in fact be undertaking any legal aid work, even when surrounded by areas of likely legal aid need (obscured shortage), and that certain types of provision may be unavailable even where other types are available, while few areas have provision for multiple legal problems (partial shortage). These findings call into question the dichotomy of met and unmet legal need. We argue that our findings demonstrate that a market-based scheme alone cannot meet the need for legal aid provision.</p
Understanding insect motion vision through computational modelling
No full textRobots have long drawn inspiration from biology. Yet, they still demand significantly more com-putational resources than animals to perform innate behaviours such as collision avoidance andtarget tracking. Insects, in particular, exhibit outwardly complex behaviours despite operating with limited computational capacity. In this thesis, we harness computational neuroscience and neuromorphic computing techniques to design insect-inspired algorithms that not only advance our understanding of insect neural circuits but also support the development of networks tailored for robotics applications. We focus specifically on the vision-driven neural circuits underlying innate behaviours in hoverflies and locusts, leveraging neuromorphic event cameras and computing techniques to exploit the sparse nature of spike-based computation and develop models that are both computationally efficient and energy-parsimonious.</p