Context is everything: national variation in societal impact assessment

Abstract

Publicly funded research universities are increasingly required to demonstrate their societal value through detailed reporting mechanisms. In several national contexts, this has taken the form of narrative impact case studies submitted for formal assessment. This paper examines the extent of convergence in constructions of societal impact across case studies from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong. Topic modelling was applied to the full corpus of impact case studies (n = 7275) to identify thematic patterns; lexicon analysis was used on a stratified subset (n = 1514) to assess alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals; and qualitative coding was conducted on a sample of high..