what is the importance of research in our society essay

The Importance of Research in the Advancement of Society

Thanks to the internet and other technologies, life moves at a very fast pace. We’re constantly adapting and learning new ways to do things–as well as expecting and even demanding innovation from our scientists, executives, and leaders.

Without research, our demands would go completely unanswered!

Curiosity leads to research

Research is what propels humanity forward. It’s fueled by curiosity: we get curious, ask questions, and immerse ourselves in discovering everything there is to know. Learning is thriving. Without curiosity and research, progress would slow to a halt, and our lives as we know them would be completely different.

What would happen without research?

If early civilizations hadn’t been curious about the dark sky, we wouldn’t know anything about space. Decades of research have led us to where we are today: a civilized society with the knowledge and tools to move forward.

If that research slowed to a standstill, what would happen?

We’d become ignorant and unaware. We wouldn’t understand or go forward. Without research, we couldn’t say we were close to finding the cure for cancer or find the most eco-friendly way to light up our homes and offices. We wouldn’t know that, even though bees are not our favorites, they do a job that help us all.

Without research, we could not possibly have survived as long as we have.

And there are still millions of things that have yet to be discovered: diseases to cure, waters to explore, species to discover. All of that is possible with research.

The future of research

Thankfully, schools are becoming more concerned with science and technology, and research is finding its place in the minds of today’s students. Students are eager to make discoveries, create solutions to the world’s problems, and invent the next big thing. We’re going places, one research project at a time.

How do we enable researchers to spend their time on, well, research (instead of filling out forms)? Thankfully, there’s cloud-based software to make that easier. Researchers and research administrators can find funding faster , apply for it more easily, manage their funding once they get it, meet federal and local requirements for documentation, stay in compliance if research involves humans or animals, and make sure research facilities are safe .

All of that means they’re one step closer to tomorrow’s big discoveries.

Adapted from an essay by Cali Simboli

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Importance Of Research In Daily Life

Whether we are students, professionals, or stay-at-home parents, we all need to do research on a daily basis.

The reason?

Research helps us make informed decisions.

It allows us to learn about new things, and it teaches us how to think critically.

There is an importance of research in daily life.

Let’s discuss the importance of research in our daily lives and how it can help us achieve our goals!

6 ways research plays an important role in our daily lives.

• It leads to new discoveries and innovations that improve our lives. Many of the technologies we rely on today are the result of research in fields like medicine, computer science, engineering, etc. Things like smartphones, wifi, GPS, and medical treatments were made possible by research.
• It informs policy making. Research provides data and evidence that allows policymakers to make more informed decisions on issues that impact society, whether it’s related to health, education, the economy, or other areas. Research gives insights into problems.
• It spreads knowledge and awareness. The research contributes new information and facts to various fields and disciplines. The sharing of research educates people on new topics, ideas, social issues, etc. It provides context for understanding the world.
• It drives progress and change. Research challenges existing notions, tests new theories and hypotheses, and pushes boundaries of what’s known. Pushing the frontiers of knowledge through research is key for advancement. Even when research invalidates ideas, it leads to progress.
• It develops critical thinking skills. The research process itself – asking questions, collecting data, analyzing results, drawing conclusions – builds logic, problem-solving, and cognitive skills that benefit individuals in their professional and personal lives.
• It fuels innovation and the economy. Research leads to the development of new products and services that create jobs and improve productivity in the marketplace. Private sector research drives economic growth.

So while not always visible, research underlies much of our technological, social, economic, and human progress. It’s a building block for society.

Conducting quality research and using it to maximum benefit is key.

Research is important in everyday life because it allows us to make informed decisions about the things that matter most to us.

Whether we’re researching a new car before making a purchase, studying for an important test, or looking into different treatment options for a health issue, research allows us to get the facts and make the best choices for ourselves and our families.

• In today’s world, there’s so much information available at our fingertips, and research is more accessible than ever.
• The internet has made it possible for anyone with an interest in doing research to access vast amounts of information in a short amount of time.

This is both a blessing and a curse; while it’s great that we have so much information available to us, it can be overwhelming to try to sort through everything and find the most reliable sources.

What is the importance of research in our daily life?

Research is essential to our daily lives.

• It helps us to make informed decisions about everything from the food we eat to the medicines we take.
• It also allows us to better understand the world around us and find solutions to problems.

In short, research is essential for our health, safety, and well-being. Without it, we would be living in a world of ignorance and misinformation.

What is the importance of research in our daily lives as a student?

As a student, research plays an important role in our daily life. It helps us to gain knowledge and understanding of the world around us.

• It also allows us to develop new skills and perspectives.
• In addition, research helps us to innovate and create new things. 
• Research is essential for students because it helps us to learn about the world around us. Without research, we would be limited to our own personal experiences and observations.
• Research allows us to go beyond our personal bubble and explore new ideas and concepts.
• It also gives us the opportunity to develop new skills and perspectives. 
• In addition, research is important because it helps us to innovate and create new things. When we conduct research , we are constantly learning new information that can be used to create something new.

This could be anything from a new product or service to a new way of doing things.

Research is essential for students because it allows us to be innovative and create new things that can make a difference in the world.

Consequently, while each person’s daily life routine might differ based on their unique circumstances, the role that research plays in our lives as students is an integral one nonetheless.

Different though our routines might be, the value of research in our lives shines through brightly regardless.  And that importance cannot be overstated .

How does research affect your daily life?

Every day, we benefit from the countless hours of research that have been conducted by scientists and scholars around the world.

• From the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night, we rely on research to improve our lives in a variety of ways.
• For instance, many of the items we use every day, such as our phones and laptops, are the result of years of research and development.
• And when we see a news story about a new medical breakthrough or a natural disaster, it is often the result of research that has been conducted over a long period of time.

In short, research affects our daily lives in countless ways, both big and small. Without it, we would be living in a very different world.

What are the purposes of research?

The word “research” is used in a variety of ways. In its broadest sense, research includes any gathering of data, information, and facts for the advancement of knowledge.

Whether you are looking for a new recipe or trying to find a cure for cancer, the process of research is the same.

You start with a question or an area of interest and then use different sources to find information that will help you answer that question or learn more about that topic.

“The purpose of research is to find answers to questions, solve problems, or develop new knowledge.”

It is an essential tool in business , education, science, and many other fields. By conducting research, we can learn about the world around us and make it a better place.

How to do effective research 

Research is a process of uncovering facts and information about a subject.

It is usually done when preparing for an assignment or project and can be either primary research, which involves collecting data yourself, or secondary research, which involves finding existing data.

Regardless of the type of research you do, there are some effective strategies that will help you get the most out of your efforts:

• First, start by clearly defining your topic and what you hope to learn. This will help you to focus your search and find relevant information more quickly.
• Once you know what you’re looking for, try using keyword searches to find websites, articles, and other resources that are relevant to your topic.
• When evaluating each source, be sure to consider its reliability and biases.
• Finally, take good notes as you read, and make sure to keep track of where each piece of information came from so that you can easily cite it later.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your research is both thorough and accurate.

How to use research to achieve your goals.

Achieving your goals requires careful planning and a lot of hard work.

But even the best-laid plans can sometimes go awry.

That’s where research comes in.

By taking the time to do your homework, you can increase your chances of success while also learning more about your topic of interest.

When it comes to goal-setting, research can help you to identify realistic targets and develop a roadmap for achieving them.

It can also provide valuable insights into potential obstacles and how to overcome them.

In short, research is an essential tool for anyone who wants to achieve their goals.

So if you’re serious about reaching your target, be sure to do your homework first.

So the next time you are faced with a decision, don’t forget to do your research!

It could very well be the most important thing you do all day.

Jacks of Science sources the most authoritative, trustworthy, and highly recognized institutions for our article research. Learn more about our Editorial Teams process and diligence in verifying the accuracy of every article we publish.

The Role of Research Process in Society Essay (Critical Writing)

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Research is a process that enables people to increase their knowledge through undertaking surveys and experiments that seek to answer questions in the society.

Through research, scientists and other researchers have proved many phenomena, and they have found solutions to problems that the humanity face. In fact, research helps people lead good lives since it is through research that new things are discovered, old things are modified, and other things found to harm a human life disregarded.

The four readings present some techniques used to devise a good research. The works have addressed the issues associated with carrying out perfect research, and they try to prove why some methods of research are better than others.

Each reading gives a systematic way in which to carry out research. However, these readings have differences in their approach and they do not give the best (indubitable) research method.

Joanne Martin’s article, A Garbage Can Model of the Research Process, tackles research as a process of proving or disapproving a theory.

In this light, the main focus of this method is finding fault with a proposed theory; people already have a notion about what the research to be carried out entails, and they just wait for the completion of the research so as to know whether the phenomenon under research is true or not.

Joanne’s view of research is not appropriate since it gives people some predisposed ideas about the results. Joanne refers to this as the rational model of research (Mcgrath, 1982).

In this model, Joanne says that the first thing that a researcher ought to do is to formulate a problem. Then, the researcher selects the methods with which to carry out the research.

This is followed by the analysis and interpretation of the results. Ultimately, these results are used to prove or disapprove the problem formulated by the researcher at the beginning of the study.

This reading advances the scope of study to a large extent. Joanne takes a careful consideration in outlining these steps. He knows that research should be systematic, and he gives this credit to the steps he outlines.

Stone also advances the field of research by writing two articles that are indispensable to anyone carrying out research. Stone gives many theories of research, and he provides credible examples about some research methods that have been tried and tested.

First, he gives a detailed introduction to research, and he outlines things that are essential to carrying out research. He acknowledges the contribution of various scholars in the field of research, and he seeks to integrate the findings of these people to his own research so as to make his research credible (Stone, 1981).

Stone notes that some people seek to undertake research without understanding the methods of carrying out research. He goes ahead and outlines the importance of knowing research methods.

He makes it known that this is the initiating stage towards a good research. He also says that research should make sense to other people; not to the researcher only.

The results should be interpretable to ensure that the findings are applied by many people. Ambiguous and confusing results lead to ambiguous interpretations making the research not achieve its objectives.

In the following chapter, Stone gives the steps to be followed in the research process. This section gives any researcher a starting point and a guide throughout the whole process of research.

The models of research presented in this chapter can be applied in many fields. They can help researchers in different fields to come up with research that fits those fields well.

This makes these chapters credible in the field of research. In fact, a lot of researchers have successfully applied Stone’s suggestions in their research (Stone, 1981).

Kaplan focuses on behavioral surveys in his writings about research. His writings are mostly applied by researchers in the field of psychology and social sciences because these sciences rely on observation and the use of logic. In fact, Kaplan emphasizes the use of reason in these surveys.

These surveys are challenging since they do not rely on hard scientific evidence. A researcher just observes the test population and derives conclusions based on the common behavior exhibited.

Therefore, these surveys need a socialistic approach as opposed to the empirical approach applied in other forms of scientific research (Kaplan, 1973).

Richard says that research should be an interesting process. In fact, he likens research with some interesting things like reading a novel or a poem.

For this to happen, a person must organize research well for it to look appealing; thus, one will enjoy doing the research (Daft, 1983).

He says that research should follow an organized pattern. According to him, research that has a good organization is easier to interpret than the research that does not follow any organizational order.

All the readings outlined in this unit lead to one conclusion, namely, people have not come up with a research method that is perfect, and they keep on trying to find more methods to do a better research.

However, many researchers (including researchers in the readings above) have argued that a lot needs to be done in the field of research.

People should know that the research requires a considerable amount of energy since gathering relevant information takes a lot of time making it not possible for many people to carry out a perfect research (Mcgrath, 1982).

Daft, L. (1983). Learning the craft of organizational research . Texas: Academy of Management Review.

Kaplan, A. (1973). Chapter 1: Methodology. In A. Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Sciences . NY: Harper & Row Publishers.

Mcgrath, J. (1982). A garbage can model of the research process. In J. McGrath, J. Martin & R. Kulka, Judgment Calls in Research . LA, CA: Sage Publications.

Stone, F. (1981). Chapter 1: Introduction to organizational research. In F. Stone, Research Methods in Organizational Behavior. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman.

Stone, F. (1981). Chapter 2: The Research Process. In F. Stone, Research Methods in Organizational Behavior. Glenview, IL: Scott-Foresman.

• The Rational Choice Approach in Comparative Analysis
• How Historians Study History by Use of Religion
• Chocolat by Joanne Harris and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood: Discussing the Relations Between Food and Family, Friends, and Comminity
• Business Ethics: Stealing from Employer
• The "Harry Potter" Novels by Joanne Rowling
• Formulating a Research Question in Action Research
• Limits and Merits of Small sample surveys
• Paradigm: Knowledge Development and Practice Theories Selection
• Qualitative and Quantitative Research Designs’ Differences
• How Qualitative Research, Historical Research, Descriptive Research, and Experimental Research Differ
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, April 10). The Role of Research Process in Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/research-process/

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Bibliography

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2.1 Why Is Research Important?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain how scientific research addresses questions about behavior
• Discuss how scientific research guides public policy
• Appreciate how scientific research can be important in making personal decisions

Scientific research is a critical tool for successfully navigating our complex world. Without it, we would be forced to rely solely on intuition, other people’s authority, and blind luck. While many of us feel confident in our abilities to decipher and interact with the world around us, history is filled with examples of how very wrong we can be when we fail to recognize the need for evidence in supporting claims. At various times in history, we would have been certain that the sun revolved around a flat earth, that the earth’s continents did not move, and that mental illness was caused by possession ( Figure 2.2 ). It is through systematic scientific research that we divest ourselves of our preconceived notions and superstitions and gain an objective understanding of ourselves and our world.

The goal of all scientists is to better understand the world around them. Psychologists focus their attention on understanding behavior, as well as the cognitive (mental) and physiological (body) processes that underlie behavior. In contrast to other methods that people use to understand the behavior of others, such as intuition and personal experience, the hallmark of scientific research is that there is evidence to support a claim. Scientific knowledge is empirical : It is grounded in objective, tangible evidence that can be observed time and time again, regardless of who is observing.

While behavior is observable, the mind is not. If someone is crying, we can see behavior. However, the reason for the behavior is more difficult to determine. Is the person crying due to being sad, in pain, or happy? Sometimes we can learn the reason for someone’s behavior by simply asking a question, like “Why are you crying?” However, there are situations in which an individual is either uncomfortable or unwilling to answer the question honestly, or is incapable of answering. For example, infants would not be able to explain why they are crying. In such circumstances, the psychologist must be creative in finding ways to better understand behavior. This chapter explores how scientific knowledge is generated, and how important that knowledge is in forming decisions in our personal lives and in the public domain.

Use of Research Information

Trying to determine which theories are and are not accepted by the scientific community can be difficult, especially in an area of research as broad as psychology. More than ever before, we have an incredible amount of information at our fingertips, and a simple internet search on any given research topic might result in a number of contradictory studies. In these cases, we are witnessing the scientific community going through the process of reaching a consensus, and it could be quite some time before a consensus emerges. For example, the explosion in our use of technology has led researchers to question whether this ultimately helps or hinders us. The use and implementation of technology in educational settings has become widespread over the last few decades. Researchers are coming to different conclusions regarding the use of technology. To illustrate this point, a study investigating a smartphone app targeting surgery residents (graduate students in surgery training) found that the use of this app can increase student engagement and raise test scores (Shaw & Tan, 2015). Conversely, another study found that the use of technology in undergraduate student populations had negative impacts on sleep, communication, and time management skills (Massimini & Peterson, 2009). Until sufficient amounts of research have been conducted, there will be no clear consensus on the effects that technology has on a student's acquisition of knowledge, study skills, and mental health.

In the meantime, we should strive to think critically about the information we encounter by exercising a degree of healthy skepticism. When someone makes a claim, we should examine the claim from a number of different perspectives: what is the expertise of the person making the claim, what might they gain if the claim is valid, does the claim seem justified given the evidence, and what do other researchers think of the claim? This is especially important when we consider how much information in advertising campaigns and on the internet claims to be based on “scientific evidence” when in actuality it is a belief or perspective of just a few individuals trying to sell a product or draw attention to their perspectives.

We should be informed consumers of the information made available to us because decisions based on this information have significant consequences. One such consequence can be seen in politics and public policy. Imagine that you have been elected as the governor of your state. One of your responsibilities is to manage the state budget and determine how to best spend your constituents’ tax dollars. As the new governor, you need to decide whether to continue funding early intervention programs. These programs are designed to help children who come from low-income backgrounds, have special needs, or face other disadvantages. These programs may involve providing a wide variety of services to maximize the children's development and position them for optimal levels of success in school and later in life (Blann, 2005). While such programs sound appealing, you would want to be sure that they also proved effective before investing additional money in these programs. Fortunately, psychologists and other scientists have conducted vast amounts of research on such programs and, in general, the programs are found to be effective (Neil & Christensen, 2009; Peters-Scheffer, Didden, Korzilius, & Sturmey, 2011). While not all programs are equally effective, and the short-term effects of many such programs are more pronounced, there is reason to believe that many of these programs produce long-term benefits for participants (Barnett, 2011). If you are committed to being a good steward of taxpayer money, you would want to look at research. Which programs are most effective? What characteristics of these programs make them effective? Which programs promote the best outcomes? After examining the research, you would be best equipped to make decisions about which programs to fund.

Link to Learning

Watch this video about early childhood program effectiveness to learn how scientists evaluate effectiveness and how best to invest money into programs that are most effective.

Ultimately, it is not just politicians who can benefit from using research in guiding their decisions. We all might look to research from time to time when making decisions in our lives. Imagine that your sister, Maria, expresses concern about her two-year-old child, Umberto. Umberto does not speak as much or as clearly as the other children in his daycare or others in the family. Umberto's pediatrician undertakes some screening and recommends an evaluation by a speech pathologist, but does not refer Maria to any other specialists. Maria is concerned that Umberto's speech delays are signs of a developmental disorder, but Umberto's pediatrician does not; she sees indications of differences in Umberto's jaw and facial muscles. Hearing this, you do some internet searches, but you are overwhelmed by the breadth of information and the wide array of sources. You see blog posts, top-ten lists, advertisements from healthcare providers, and recommendations from several advocacy organizations. Why are there so many sites? Which are based in research, and which are not?

In the end, research is what makes the difference between facts and opinions. Facts are observable realities, and opinions are personal judgments, conclusions, or attitudes that may or may not be accurate. In the scientific community, facts can be established only using evidence collected through empirical research.

NOTABLE RESEARCHERS

Psychological research has a long history involving important figures from diverse backgrounds. While the introductory chapter discussed several researchers who made significant contributions to the discipline, there are many more individuals who deserve attention in considering how psychology has advanced as a science through their work ( Figure 2.3 ). For instance, Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939) was the first woman to earn a PhD in psychology. Her research focused on animal behavior and cognition (Margaret Floy Washburn, PhD, n.d.). Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) was a preeminent first-generation American psychologist who opposed the behaviorist movement, conducted significant research into memory, and established one of the earliest experimental psychology labs in the United States (Mary Whiton Calkins, n.d.).

Francis Sumner (1895–1954) was the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology in 1920. His dissertation focused on issues related to psychoanalysis. Sumner also had research interests in racial bias and educational justice. Sumner was one of the founders of Howard University’s department of psychology, and because of his accomplishments, he is sometimes referred to as the “Father of Black Psychology.” Thirteen years later, Inez Beverly Prosser (1895–1934) became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in psychology. Prosser’s research highlighted issues related to education in segregated versus integrated schools, and ultimately, her work was very influential in the hallmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional (Ethnicity and Health in America Series: Featured Psychologists, n.d.).

Although the establishment of psychology’s scientific roots occurred first in Europe and the United States, it did not take much time until researchers from around the world began to establish their own laboratories and research programs. For example, some of the first experimental psychology laboratories in South America were founded by Horatio Piñero (1869–1919) at two institutions in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Godoy & Brussino, 2010). In India, Gunamudian David Boaz (1908–1965) and Narendra Nath Sen Gupta (1889–1944) established the first independent departments of psychology at the University of Madras and the University of Calcutta, respectively. These developments provided an opportunity for Indian researchers to make important contributions to the field (Gunamudian David Boaz, n.d.; Narendra Nath Sen Gupta, n.d.).

When the American Psychological Association (APA) was first founded in 1892, all of the members were White males (Women and Minorities in Psychology, n.d.). However, by 1905, Mary Whiton Calkins was elected as the first female president of the APA, and by 1946, nearly one-quarter of American psychologists were female. Psychology became a popular degree option for students enrolled in the nation’s historically Black higher education institutions, increasing the number of Black Americans who went on to become psychologists. Given demographic shifts occurring in the United States and increased access to higher educational opportunities among historically underrepresented populations, there is reason to hope that the diversity of the field will increasingly match the larger population, and that the research contributions made by the psychologists of the future will better serve people of all backgrounds (Women and Minorities in Psychology, n.d.).

The Process of Scientific Research

Scientific knowledge is advanced through a process known as the scientific method . Basically, ideas (in the form of theories and hypotheses) are tested against the real world (in the form of empirical observations), and those empirical observations lead to more ideas that are tested against the real world, and so on. In this sense, the scientific process is circular. The types of reasoning within the circle are called deductive and inductive. In deductive reasoning , ideas are tested in the real world; in inductive reasoning , real-world observations lead to new ideas ( Figure 2.4 ). These processes are inseparable, like inhaling and exhaling, but different research approaches place different emphasis on the deductive and inductive aspects.

In the scientific context, deductive reasoning begins with a generalization—one hypothesis—that is then used to reach logical conclusions about the real world. If the hypothesis is correct, then the logical conclusions reached through deductive reasoning should also be correct. A deductive reasoning argument might go something like this: All living things require energy to survive (this would be your hypothesis). Ducks are living things. Therefore, ducks require energy to survive (logical conclusion). In this example, the hypothesis is correct; therefore, the conclusion is correct as well. Sometimes, however, an incorrect hypothesis may lead to a logical but incorrect conclusion. Consider this argument: all ducks are born with the ability to see. Quackers is a duck. Therefore, Quackers was born with the ability to see. Scientists use deductive reasoning to empirically test their hypotheses. Returning to the example of the ducks, researchers might design a study to test the hypothesis that if all living things require energy to survive, then ducks will be found to require energy to survive.

Deductive reasoning starts with a generalization that is tested against real-world observations; however, inductive reasoning moves in the opposite direction. Inductive reasoning uses empirical observations to construct broad generalizations. Unlike deductive reasoning, conclusions drawn from inductive reasoning may or may not be correct, regardless of the observations on which they are based. For instance, you may notice that your favorite fruits—apples, bananas, and oranges—all grow on trees; therefore, you assume that all fruit must grow on trees. This would be an example of inductive reasoning, and, clearly, the existence of strawberries, blueberries, and kiwi demonstrate that this generalization is not correct despite it being based on a number of direct observations. Scientists use inductive reasoning to formulate theories, which in turn generate hypotheses that are tested with deductive reasoning. In the end, science involves both deductive and inductive processes.

For example, case studies, which you will read about in the next section, are heavily weighted on the side of empirical observations. Thus, case studies are closely associated with inductive processes as researchers gather massive amounts of observations and seek interesting patterns (new ideas) in the data. Experimental research, on the other hand, puts great emphasis on deductive reasoning.

We’ve stated that theories and hypotheses are ideas, but what sort of ideas are they, exactly? A theory is a well-developed set of ideas that propose an explanation for observed phenomena. Theories are repeatedly checked against the world, but they tend to be too complex to be tested all at once; instead, researchers create hypotheses to test specific aspects of a theory.

A hypothesis is a testable prediction about how the world will behave if our idea is correct, and it is often worded as an if-then statement (e.g., if I study all night, I will get a passing grade on the test). The hypothesis is extremely important because it bridges the gap between the realm of ideas and the real world. As specific hypotheses are tested, theories are modified and refined to reflect and incorporate the result of these tests Figure 2.5 .

To see how this process works, let’s consider a specific theory and a hypothesis that might be generated from that theory. As you’ll learn in a later chapter, the James-Lange theory of emotion asserts that emotional experience relies on the physiological arousal associated with the emotional state. If you walked out of your home and discovered a very aggressive snake waiting on your doorstep, your heart would begin to race and your stomach churn. According to the James-Lange theory, these physiological changes would result in your feeling of fear. A hypothesis that could be derived from this theory might be that a person who is unaware of the physiological arousal that the sight of the snake elicits will not feel fear.

A scientific hypothesis is also falsifiable , or capable of being shown to be incorrect. Recall from the introductory chapter that Sigmund Freud had lots of interesting ideas to explain various human behaviors ( Figure 2.6 ). However, a major criticism of Freud’s theories is that many of his ideas are not falsifiable; for example, it is impossible to imagine empirical observations that would disprove the existence of the id, the ego, and the superego—the three elements of personality described in Freud’s theories. Despite this, Freud’s theories are widely taught in introductory psychology texts because of their historical significance for personality psychology and psychotherapy, and these remain the root of all modern forms of therapy.

In contrast, the James-Lange theory does generate falsifiable hypotheses, such as the one described above. Some individuals who suffer significant injuries to their spinal columns are unable to feel the bodily changes that often accompany emotional experiences. Therefore, we could test the hypothesis by determining how emotional experiences differ between individuals who have the ability to detect these changes in their physiological arousal and those who do not. In fact, this research has been conducted and while the emotional experiences of people deprived of an awareness of their physiological arousal may be less intense, they still experience emotion (Chwalisz, Diener, & Gallagher, 1988).

Scientific research’s dependence on falsifiability allows for great confidence in the information that it produces. Typically, by the time information is accepted by the scientific community, it has been tested repeatedly.

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11.1 The Purpose of Research Writing

Learning objectives.

• Identify reasons to research writing projects.
• Outline the steps of the research writing process.

Why was the Great Wall of China built? What have scientists learned about the possibility of life on Mars? What roles did women play in the American Revolution? How does the human brain create, store, and retrieve memories? Who invented the game of football, and how has it changed over the years?

You may know the answers to these questions off the top of your head. If you are like most people, however, you find answers to tough questions like these by searching the Internet, visiting the library, or asking others for information. To put it simply, you perform research.

Whether you are a scientist, an artist, a paralegal, or a parent, you probably perform research in your everyday life. When your boss, your instructor, or a family member asks you a question that you do not know the answer to, you locate relevant information, analyze your findings, and share your results. Locating, analyzing, and sharing information are key steps in the research process, and in this chapter, you will learn more about each step. By developing your research writing skills, you will prepare yourself to answer any question no matter how challenging.

Reasons for Research

When you perform research, you are essentially trying to solve a mystery—you want to know how something works or why something happened. In other words, you want to answer a question that you (and other people) have about the world. This is one of the most basic reasons for performing research.

But the research process does not end when you have solved your mystery. Imagine what would happen if a detective collected enough evidence to solve a criminal case, but she never shared her solution with the authorities. Presenting what you have learned from research can be just as important as performing the research. Research results can be presented in a variety of ways, but one of the most popular—and effective—presentation forms is the research paper . A research paper presents an original thesis, or purpose statement, about a topic and develops that thesis with information gathered from a variety of sources.

If you are curious about the possibility of life on Mars, for example, you might choose to research the topic. What will you do, though, when your research is complete? You will need a way to put your thoughts together in a logical, coherent manner. You may want to use the facts you have learned to create a narrative or to support an argument. And you may want to show the results of your research to your friends, your teachers, or even the editors of magazines and journals. Writing a research paper is an ideal way to organize thoughts, craft narratives or make arguments based on research, and share your newfound knowledge with the world.

Write a paragraph about a time when you used research in your everyday life. Did you look for the cheapest way to travel from Houston to Denver? Did you search for a way to remove gum from the bottom of your shoe? In your paragraph, explain what you wanted to research, how you performed the research, and what you learned as a result.

Research Writing and the Academic Paper

No matter what field of study you are interested in, you will most likely be asked to write a research paper during your academic career. For example, a student in an art history course might write a research paper about an artist’s work. Similarly, a student in a psychology course might write a research paper about current findings in childhood development.

Having to write a research paper may feel intimidating at first. After all, researching and writing a long paper requires a lot of time, effort, and organization. However, writing a research paper can also be a great opportunity to explore a topic that is particularly interesting to you. The research process allows you to gain expertise on a topic of your choice, and the writing process helps you remember what you have learned and understand it on a deeper level.

Research Writing at Work

Knowing how to write a good research paper is a valuable skill that will serve you well throughout your career. Whether you are developing a new product, studying the best way to perform a procedure, or learning about challenges and opportunities in your field of employment, you will use research techniques to guide your exploration. You may even need to create a written report of your findings. And because effective communication is essential to any company, employers seek to hire people who can write clearly and professionally.

Writing at Work

Take a few minutes to think about each of the following careers. How might each of these professionals use researching and research writing skills on the job?

• Medical laboratory technician
• Small business owner
• Information technology professional
• Freelance magazine writer

A medical laboratory technician or information technology professional might do research to learn about the latest technological developments in either of these fields. A small business owner might conduct research to learn about the latest trends in his or her industry. A freelance magazine writer may need to research a given topic to write an informed, up-to-date article.

Think about the job of your dreams. How might you use research writing skills to perform that job? Create a list of ways in which strong researching, organizing, writing, and critical thinking skills could help you succeed at your dream job. How might these skills help you obtain that job?

Steps of the Research Writing Process

How does a research paper grow from a folder of brainstormed notes to a polished final draft? No two projects are identical, but most projects follow a series of six basic steps.

These are the steps in the research writing process:

• Choose a topic.
• Plan and schedule time to research and write.
• Conduct research.
• Organize research and ideas.
• Draft your paper.
• Revise and edit your paper.

Each of these steps will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. For now, though, we will take a brief look at what each step involves.

Step 1: Choosing a Topic

As you may recall from Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” , to narrow the focus of your topic, you may try freewriting exercises, such as brainstorming. You may also need to ask a specific research question —a broad, open-ended question that will guide your research—as well as propose a possible answer, or a working thesis . You may use your research question and your working thesis to create a research proposal . In a research proposal, you present your main research question, any related subquestions you plan to explore, and your working thesis.

Step 2: Planning and Scheduling

Before you start researching your topic, take time to plan your researching and writing schedule. Research projects can take days, weeks, or even months to complete. Creating a schedule is a good way to ensure that you do not end up being overwhelmed by all the work you have to do as the deadline approaches.

During this step of the process, it is also a good idea to plan the resources and organizational tools you will use to keep yourself on track throughout the project. Flowcharts, calendars, and checklists can all help you stick to your schedule. See Chapter 11 “Writing from Research: What Will I Learn?” , Section 11.2 “Steps in Developing a Research Proposal” for an example of a research schedule.

Step 3: Conducting Research

When going about your research, you will likely use a variety of sources—anything from books and periodicals to video presentations and in-person interviews.

Your sources will include both primary sources and secondary sources . Primary sources provide firsthand information or raw data. For example, surveys, in-person interviews, and historical documents are primary sources. Secondary sources, such as biographies, literary reviews, or magazine articles, include some analysis or interpretation of the information presented. As you conduct research, you will take detailed, careful notes about your discoveries. You will also evaluate the reliability of each source you find.

Step 4: Organizing Research and the Writer’s Ideas

When your research is complete, you will organize your findings and decide which sources to cite in your paper. You will also have an opportunity to evaluate the evidence you have collected and determine whether it supports your thesis, or the focus of your paper. You may decide to adjust your thesis or conduct additional research to ensure that your thesis is well supported.

Remember, your working thesis is not set in stone. You can and should change your working thesis throughout the research writing process if the evidence you find does not support your original thesis. Never try to force evidence to fit your argument. For example, your working thesis is “Mars cannot support life-forms.” Yet, a week into researching your topic, you find an article in the New York Times detailing new findings of bacteria under the Martian surface. Instead of trying to argue that bacteria are not life forms, you might instead alter your thesis to “Mars cannot support complex life-forms.”

Step 5: Drafting Your Paper

Now you are ready to combine your research findings with your critical analysis of the results in a rough draft. You will incorporate source materials into your paper and discuss each source thoughtfully in relation to your thesis or purpose statement.

When you cite your reference sources, it is important to pay close attention to standard conventions for citing sources in order to avoid plagiarism , or the practice of using someone else’s words without acknowledging the source. Later in this chapter, you will learn how to incorporate sources in your paper and avoid some of the most common pitfalls of attributing information.

Step 6: Revising and Editing Your Paper

In the final step of the research writing process, you will revise and polish your paper. You might reorganize your paper’s structure or revise for unity and cohesion, ensuring that each element in your paper flows into the next logically and naturally. You will also make sure that your paper uses an appropriate and consistent tone.

Once you feel confident in the strength of your writing, you will edit your paper for proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and formatting. When you complete this final step, you will have transformed a simple idea or question into a thoroughly researched and well-written paper you can be proud of!

Review the steps of the research writing process. Then answer the questions on your own sheet of paper.

• In which steps of the research writing process are you allowed to change your thesis?
• In step 2, which types of information should you include in your project schedule?
• What might happen if you eliminated step 4 from the research writing process?

Key Takeaways

• People undertake research projects throughout their academic and professional careers in order to answer specific questions, share their findings with others, increase their understanding of challenging topics, and strengthen their researching, writing, and analytical skills.
• The research writing process generally comprises six steps: choosing a topic, scheduling and planning time for research and writing, conducting research, organizing research and ideas, drafting a paper, and revising and editing the paper.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

How does research impact your everyday life?

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

What would the modern world look like without the bedrock of research?

First and foremost – without research, there’s no way you’d possibly be reading this right now, as the Internet was pioneered and developed (via a whole heap of exhaustive research…) by the European Organization for Nuclear Research , or CERN, the same association that produced the Large Hadron Collider.

Without research, we’d likely also be utterly defenceless to the brutal forces of nature. For example, without meteorology, we’d be unable to predict the path of violent storms, hurricanes and tornadoes, while a lack of volcanology research would leave a huge proportion of the world susceptible to the destruction of volcanic eruptions.

And it doesn’t end there.

Medical technology and discovery would be non-existent – no MRi , no anaesthetic, no birth control, no X-Ray machine, no insulin, no IVF, no penicillin, no germ theory, no DNA, and no smallpox vaccination – which, by the way would have wiped out one out of every nine babies had Jenner not researched and found a cure.

Source: University of Surrey

So not only is research an invaluable tool for building on crucial knowledge, it’s also the most reliable way we can begin to understand the complexities of various issues; to maintain our integrity as we disprove lies and uphold important truths; to serve as the seed for analysing convoluted sets of data; as well as to serve as ‘nourishment’, or exercise for the mind.

“…Aside from the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, research is linked to problem solving,” John Armstrong, a respected global higher education and research professional, writes for The Conversation. “What this means is the solving of other people’s problems. That is, what other people experience as problems.

“It starts with a tenderness and ambition that is directed at the needs of others – as they recognise and acknowledge those needs,” he continues. “This is, in effect, entry into a market place. Much research, of course, is conducted in precisely this way beyond the walls of the academy.”

Ultimately, when we begin to look at research for what it truly is – a catalyst for solving complex issues – we begin to understand the impact it truly has on our everyday lives. The University of Surrey , set just a 10 minute walk from the centre of Guildford – ranked the 8 th best place to live in the UK in the Halifax Quality of Life Survey – is a prime example of a university producing high-impact research for the benefit of our global society.

Surrey’s experienced research team found that pollution levels inside cars were found to be up to 40 percent higher while sitting in queues, or at red lights, when compared to free-flowing traffic conditions. And with the World Health Organisation (WHO) placing outdoor air pollution among the top 10 health risks currently facing humans, linking to seven million premature deaths each year, Surrey took on the research challenge of finding an effective solution…

…And boy, did they get the results!

“Where possible and the weather conditional allowing, it is one of the best ways to limit your exposure by keeping windows shut, fans turned off and to try and increase the distance between you and the car in front while at traffic jams or stationary at traffic lights,” says Dr Prashant Kumar, Senior Author of the study. “If the fan or heater needs to be on, the best setting would be to have the air re-circulating within the car without drawing air from outdoors.”

Researchers actually found that closed windows or re-circulated air can reduce in-car pollutants by as much as 76 percent, highlighting how Surrey’s research outcomes could bring a wealth of invaluable global benefits.

As further testament to Surrey’s impactful research success, a study that uncovered high levels of Vitamin D inadequacy among UK adolescents has been published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , and has now been used to inform crucial national guidance from Public Health England.

“The research has found that adolescence, the time when bone growth is most important in laying down the foundations for later life, is a time when Vitamin D levels are inadequate,” says Dr Taryn Smith, Lead Author of the study. The study forms part of a four-year, EU-funded project, ODIN, which aims to investigate safe and effective ways of boosting Vitamin D intake through food fortification and bio-fortification.

“The ODIN project is investigating ways of improving Vitamin D intake through diet,” continues Dr Smith, “and since it is difficult to obtain Vitamin D intakes of over 10ug/day from food sources alone, it is looking at ways of fortifying our food to improve the Vitamin D levels of the UK population as a whole.”

But the impact of Surrey’s research is broad and all-encompassing, with on-going projects into things like radiotherapy, dementia, blue light and human attentiveness, disaster monitoring, sustainable development, digital storytelling, and beyond. And benefits of research produced at the University of Surrey is not meant for the UK population alone; these are the issues that face us as an increasingly international and interconnected society, making research produced by world-class institutions like Surrey the tools to pave the way to bigger, brighter and healthier global future.

Find out more about studying for a postgraduate degree at Surrey by registering for one of Surrey’s Webinars .

Follow Surrey on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , YouTube , Pinterest and LinkedIn

Feature image via Shutterstock

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What Is Research, and Why Do People Do It?

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• First Online: 03 December 2022

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• James Hiebert 6 ,
• Jinfa Cai 7 ,
• Stephen Hwang 7 ,
• Anne K Morris 6 &
• Charles Hohensee 6  

Part of the book series: Research in Mathematics Education ((RME))

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Abstractspiepr Abs1

Every day people do research as they gather information to learn about something of interest. In the scientific world, however, research means something different than simply gathering information. Scientific research is characterized by its careful planning and observing, by its relentless efforts to understand and explain, and by its commitment to learn from everyone else seriously engaged in research. We call this kind of research scientific inquiry and define it as “formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses.” By “hypotheses” we do not mean the hypotheses you encounter in statistics courses. We mean predictions about what you expect to find and rationales for why you made these predictions. Throughout this and the remaining chapters we make clear that the process of scientific inquiry applies to all kinds of research studies and data, both qualitative and quantitative.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

Part I. What Is Research?

Have you ever studied something carefully because you wanted to know more about it? Maybe you wanted to know more about your grandmother’s life when she was younger so you asked her to tell you stories from her childhood, or maybe you wanted to know more about a fertilizer you were about to use in your garden so you read the ingredients on the package and looked them up online. According to the dictionary definition, you were doing research.

Recall your high school assignments asking you to “research” a topic. The assignment likely included consulting a variety of sources that discussed the topic, perhaps including some “original” sources. Often, the teacher referred to your product as a “research paper.”

Were you conducting research when you interviewed your grandmother or wrote high school papers reviewing a particular topic? Our view is that you were engaged in part of the research process, but only a small part. In this book, we reserve the word “research” for what it means in the scientific world, that is, for scientific research or, more pointedly, for scientific inquiry .

Exercise 1.1

Before you read any further, write a definition of what you think scientific inquiry is. Keep it short—Two to three sentences. You will periodically update this definition as you read this chapter and the remainder of the book.

This book is about scientific inquiry—what it is and how to do it. For starters, scientific inquiry is a process, a particular way of finding out about something that involves a number of phases. Each phase of the process constitutes one aspect of scientific inquiry. You are doing scientific inquiry as you engage in each phase, but you have not done scientific inquiry until you complete the full process. Each phase is necessary but not sufficient.

In this chapter, we set the stage by defining scientific inquiry—describing what it is and what it is not—and by discussing what it is good for and why people do it. The remaining chapters build directly on the ideas presented in this chapter.

A first thing to know is that scientific inquiry is not all or nothing. “Scientificness” is a continuum. Inquiries can be more scientific or less scientific. What makes an inquiry more scientific? You might be surprised there is no universally agreed upon answer to this question. None of the descriptors we know of are sufficient by themselves to define scientific inquiry. But all of them give you a way of thinking about some aspects of the process of scientific inquiry. Each one gives you different insights.

Exercise 1.2

As you read about each descriptor below, think about what would make an inquiry more or less scientific. If you think a descriptor is important, use it to revise your definition of scientific inquiry.

Creating an Image of Scientific Inquiry

We will present three descriptors of scientific inquiry. Each provides a different perspective and emphasizes a different aspect of scientific inquiry. We will draw on all three descriptors to compose our definition of scientific inquiry.

Descriptor 1. Experience Carefully Planned in Advance

Sir Ronald Fisher, often called the father of modern statistical design, once referred to research as “experience carefully planned in advance” (1935, p. 8). He said that humans are always learning from experience, from interacting with the world around them. Usually, this learning is haphazard rather than the result of a deliberate process carried out over an extended period of time. Research, Fisher said, was learning from experience, but experience carefully planned in advance.

This phrase can be fully appreciated by looking at each word. The fact that scientific inquiry is based on experience means that it is based on interacting with the world. These interactions could be thought of as the stuff of scientific inquiry. In addition, it is not just any experience that counts. The experience must be carefully planned . The interactions with the world must be conducted with an explicit, describable purpose, and steps must be taken to make the intended learning as likely as possible. This planning is an integral part of scientific inquiry; it is not just a preparation phase. It is one of the things that distinguishes scientific inquiry from many everyday learning experiences. Finally, these steps must be taken beforehand and the purpose of the inquiry must be articulated in advance of the experience. Clearly, scientific inquiry does not happen by accident, by just stumbling into something. Stumbling into something unexpected and interesting can happen while engaged in scientific inquiry, but learning does not depend on it and serendipity does not make the inquiry scientific.

Descriptor 2. Observing Something and Trying to Explain Why It Is the Way It Is

When we were writing this chapter and googled “scientific inquiry,” the first entry was: “Scientific inquiry refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work.” The emphasis is on studying, or observing, and then explaining . This descriptor takes the image of scientific inquiry beyond carefully planned experience and includes explaining what was experienced.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “explain” means “(a) to make known, (b) to make plain or understandable, (c) to give the reason or cause of, and (d) to show the logical development or relations of” (Merriam-Webster, n.d. ). We will use all these definitions. Taken together, they suggest that to explain an observation means to understand it by finding reasons (or causes) for why it is as it is. In this sense of scientific inquiry, the following are synonyms: explaining why, understanding why, and reasoning about causes and effects. Our image of scientific inquiry now includes planning, observing, and explaining why.

We need to add a final note about this descriptor. We have phrased it in a way that suggests “observing something” means you are observing something in real time—observing the way things are or the way things are changing. This is often true. But, observing could mean observing data that already have been collected, maybe by someone else making the original observations (e.g., secondary analysis of NAEP data or analysis of existing video recordings of classroom instruction). We will address secondary analyses more fully in Chap. 4 . For now, what is important is that the process requires explaining why the data look like they do.

We must note that for us, the term “data” is not limited to numerical or quantitative data such as test scores. Data can also take many nonquantitative forms, including written survey responses, interview transcripts, journal entries, video recordings of students, teachers, and classrooms, text messages, and so forth.

Exercise 1.3

What are the implications of the statement that just “observing” is not enough to count as scientific inquiry? Does this mean that a detailed description of a phenomenon is not scientific inquiry?

Find sources that define research in education that differ with our position, that say description alone, without explanation, counts as scientific research. Identify the precise points where the opinions differ. What are the best arguments for each of the positions? Which do you prefer? Why?

Descriptor 3. Updating Everyone’s Thinking in Response to More and Better Information

This descriptor focuses on a third aspect of scientific inquiry: updating and advancing the field’s understanding of phenomena that are investigated. This descriptor foregrounds a powerful characteristic of scientific inquiry: the reliability (or trustworthiness) of what is learned and the ultimate inevitability of this learning to advance human understanding of phenomena. Humans might choose not to learn from scientific inquiry, but history suggests that scientific inquiry always has the potential to advance understanding and that, eventually, humans take advantage of these new understandings.

Before exploring these bold claims a bit further, note that this descriptor uses “information” in the same way the previous two descriptors used “experience” and “observations.” These are the stuff of scientific inquiry and we will use them often, sometimes interchangeably. Frequently, we will use the term “data” to stand for all these terms.

An overriding goal of scientific inquiry is for everyone to learn from what one scientist does. Much of this book is about the methods you need to use so others have faith in what you report and can learn the same things you learned. This aspect of scientific inquiry has many implications.

One implication is that scientific inquiry is not a private practice. It is a public practice available for others to see and learn from. Notice how different this is from everyday learning. When you happen to learn something from your everyday experience, often only you gain from the experience. The fact that research is a public practice means it is also a social one. It is best conducted by interacting with others along the way: soliciting feedback at each phase, taking opportunities to present work-in-progress, and benefitting from the advice of others.

A second implication is that you, as the researcher, must be committed to sharing what you are doing and what you are learning in an open and transparent way. This allows all phases of your work to be scrutinized and critiqued. This is what gives your work credibility. The reliability or trustworthiness of your findings depends on your colleagues recognizing that you have used all appropriate methods to maximize the chances that your claims are justified by the data.

A third implication of viewing scientific inquiry as a collective enterprise is the reverse of the second—you must be committed to receiving comments from others. You must treat your colleagues as fair and honest critics even though it might sometimes feel otherwise. You must appreciate their job, which is to remain skeptical while scrutinizing what you have done in considerable detail. To provide the best help to you, they must remain skeptical about your conclusions (when, for example, the data are difficult for them to interpret) until you offer a convincing logical argument based on the information you share. A rather harsh but good-to-remember statement of the role of your friendly critics was voiced by Karl Popper, a well-known twentieth century philosopher of science: “. . . if you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can” (Popper, 1968, p. 27).

A final implication of this third descriptor is that, as someone engaged in scientific inquiry, you have no choice but to update your thinking when the data support a different conclusion. This applies to your own data as well as to those of others. When data clearly point to a specific claim, even one that is quite different than you expected, you must reconsider your position. If the outcome is replicated multiple times, you need to adjust your thinking accordingly. Scientific inquiry does not let you pick and choose which data to believe; it mandates that everyone update their thinking when the data warrant an update.

Doing Scientific Inquiry

We define scientific inquiry in an operational sense—what does it mean to do scientific inquiry? What kind of process would satisfy all three descriptors: carefully planning an experience in advance; observing and trying to explain what you see; and, contributing to updating everyone’s thinking about an important phenomenon?

We define scientific inquiry as formulating , testing , and revising hypotheses about phenomena of interest.

Of course, we are not the only ones who define it in this way. The definition for the scientific method posted by the editors of Britannica is: “a researcher develops a hypothesis, tests it through various means, and then modifies the hypothesis on the basis of the outcome of the tests and experiments” (Britannica, n.d. ).

Notice how defining scientific inquiry this way satisfies each of the descriptors. “Carefully planning an experience in advance” is exactly what happens when formulating a hypothesis about a phenomenon of interest and thinking about how to test it. “ Observing a phenomenon” occurs when testing a hypothesis, and “ explaining ” what is found is required when revising a hypothesis based on the data. Finally, “updating everyone’s thinking” comes from comparing publicly the original with the revised hypothesis.

Doing scientific inquiry, as we have defined it, underscores the value of accumulating knowledge rather than generating random bits of knowledge. Formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses is an ongoing process, with each revised hypothesis begging for another test, whether by the same researcher or by new researchers. The editors of Britannica signaled this cyclic process by adding the following phrase to their definition of the scientific method: “The modified hypothesis is then retested, further modified, and tested again.” Scientific inquiry creates a process that encourages each study to build on the studies that have gone before. Through collective engagement in this process of building study on top of study, the scientific community works together to update its thinking.

Before exploring more fully the meaning of “formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses,” we need to acknowledge that this is not the only way researchers define research. Some researchers prefer a less formal definition, one that includes more serendipity, less planning, less explanation. You might have come across more open definitions such as “research is finding out about something.” We prefer the tighter hypothesis formulation, testing, and revision definition because we believe it provides a single, coherent map for conducting research that addresses many of the thorny problems educational researchers encounter. We believe it is the most useful orientation toward research and the most helpful to learn as a beginning researcher.

A final clarification of our definition is that it applies equally to qualitative and quantitative research. This is a familiar distinction in education that has generated much discussion. You might think our definition favors quantitative methods over qualitative methods because the language of hypothesis formulation and testing is often associated with quantitative methods. In fact, we do not favor one method over another. In Chap. 4 , we will illustrate how our definition fits research using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Exercise 1.4

Look for ways to extend what the field knows in an area that has already received attention by other researchers. Specifically, you can search for a program of research carried out by more experienced researchers that has some revised hypotheses that remain untested. Identify a revised hypothesis that you might like to test.

Unpacking the Terms Formulating, Testing, and Revising Hypotheses

To get a full sense of the definition of scientific inquiry we will use throughout this book, it is helpful to spend a little time with each of the key terms.

We first want to make clear that we use the term “hypothesis” as it is defined in most dictionaries and as it used in many scientific fields rather than as it is usually defined in educational statistics courses. By “hypothesis,” we do not mean a null hypothesis that is accepted or rejected by statistical analysis. Rather, we use “hypothesis” in the sense conveyed by the following definitions: “An idea or explanation for something that is based on known facts but has not yet been proved” (Cambridge University Press, n.d. ), and “An unproved theory, proposition, or supposition, tentatively accepted to explain certain facts and to provide a basis for further investigation or argument” (Agnes & Guralnik, 2008 ).

We distinguish two parts to “hypotheses.” Hypotheses consist of predictions and rationales . Predictions are statements about what you expect to find when you inquire about something. Rationales are explanations for why you made the predictions you did, why you believe your predictions are correct. So, for us “formulating hypotheses” means making explicit predictions and developing rationales for the predictions.

“Testing hypotheses” means making observations that allow you to assess in what ways your predictions were correct and in what ways they were incorrect. In education research, it is rarely useful to think of your predictions as either right or wrong. Because of the complexity of most issues you will investigate, most predictions will be right in some ways and wrong in others.

By studying the observations you make (data you collect) to test your hypotheses, you can revise your hypotheses to better align with the observations. This means revising your predictions plus revising your rationales to justify your adjusted predictions. Even though you might not run another test, formulating revised hypotheses is an essential part of conducting a research study. Comparing your original and revised hypotheses informs everyone of what you learned by conducting your study. In addition, a revised hypothesis sets the stage for you or someone else to extend your study and accumulate more knowledge of the phenomenon.

We should note that not everyone makes a clear distinction between predictions and rationales as two aspects of hypotheses. In fact, common, non-scientific uses of the word “hypothesis” may limit it to only a prediction or only an explanation (or rationale). We choose to explicitly include both prediction and rationale in our definition of hypothesis, not because we assert this should be the universal definition, but because we want to foreground the importance of both parts acting in concert. Using “hypothesis” to represent both prediction and rationale could hide the two aspects, but we make them explicit because they provide different kinds of information. It is usually easier to make predictions than develop rationales because predictions can be guesses, hunches, or gut feelings about which you have little confidence. Developing a compelling rationale requires careful thought plus reading what other researchers have found plus talking with your colleagues. Often, while you are developing your rationale you will find good reasons to change your predictions. Developing good rationales is the engine that drives scientific inquiry. Rationales are essentially descriptions of how much you know about the phenomenon you are studying. Throughout this guide, we will elaborate on how developing good rationales drives scientific inquiry. For now, we simply note that it can sharpen your predictions and help you to interpret your data as you test your hypotheses.

Hypotheses in education research take a variety of forms or types. This is because there are a variety of phenomena that can be investigated. Investigating educational phenomena is sometimes best done using qualitative methods, sometimes using quantitative methods, and most often using mixed methods (e.g., Hay, 2016 ; Weis et al. 2019a ; Weisner, 2005 ). This means that, given our definition, hypotheses are equally applicable to qualitative and quantitative investigations.

Hypotheses take different forms when they are used to investigate different kinds of phenomena. Two very different activities in education could be labeled conducting experiments and descriptions. In an experiment, a hypothesis makes a prediction about anticipated changes, say the changes that occur when a treatment or intervention is applied. You might investigate how students’ thinking changes during a particular kind of instruction.

A second type of hypothesis, relevant for descriptive research, makes a prediction about what you will find when you investigate and describe the nature of a situation. The goal is to understand a situation as it exists rather than to understand a change from one situation to another. In this case, your prediction is what you expect to observe. Your rationale is the set of reasons for making this prediction; it is your current explanation for why the situation will look like it does.

You will probably read, if you have not already, that some researchers say you do not need a prediction to conduct a descriptive study. We will discuss this point of view in Chap. 2 . For now, we simply claim that scientific inquiry, as we have defined it, applies to all kinds of research studies. Descriptive studies, like others, not only benefit from formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses, but also need hypothesis formulating, testing, and revising.

One reason we define research as formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses is that if you think of research in this way you are less likely to go wrong. It is a useful guide for the entire process, as we will describe in detail in the chapters ahead. For example, as you build the rationale for your predictions, you are constructing the theoretical framework for your study (Chap. 3 ). As you work out the methods you will use to test your hypothesis, every decision you make will be based on asking, “Will this help me formulate or test or revise my hypothesis?” (Chap. 4 ). As you interpret the results of testing your predictions, you will compare them to what you predicted and examine the differences, focusing on how you must revise your hypotheses (Chap. 5 ). By anchoring the process to formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses, you will make smart decisions that yield a coherent and well-designed study.

Exercise 1.5

Compare the concept of formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses with the descriptions of scientific inquiry contained in Scientific Research in Education (NRC, 2002 ). How are they similar or different?

Exercise 1.6

Provide an example to illustrate and emphasize the differences between everyday learning/thinking and scientific inquiry.

Learning from Doing Scientific Inquiry

We noted earlier that a measure of what you have learned by conducting a research study is found in the differences between your original hypothesis and your revised hypothesis based on the data you collected to test your hypothesis. We will elaborate this statement in later chapters, but we preview our argument here.

Even before collecting data, scientific inquiry requires cycles of making a prediction, developing a rationale, refining your predictions, reading and studying more to strengthen your rationale, refining your predictions again, and so forth. And, even if you have run through several such cycles, you still will likely find that when you test your prediction you will be partly right and partly wrong. The results will support some parts of your predictions but not others, or the results will “kind of” support your predictions. A critical part of scientific inquiry is making sense of your results by interpreting them against your predictions. Carefully describing what aspects of your data supported your predictions, what aspects did not, and what data fell outside of any predictions is not an easy task, but you cannot learn from your study without doing this analysis.

Analyzing the matches and mismatches between your predictions and your data allows you to formulate different rationales that would have accounted for more of the data. The best revised rationale is the one that accounts for the most data. Once you have revised your rationales, you can think about the predictions they best justify or explain. It is by comparing your original rationales to your new rationales that you can sort out what you learned from your study.

Suppose your study was an experiment. Maybe you were investigating the effects of a new instructional intervention on students’ learning. Your original rationale was your explanation for why the intervention would change the learning outcomes in a particular way. Your revised rationale explained why the changes that you observed occurred like they did and why your revised predictions are better. Maybe your original rationale focused on the potential of the activities if they were implemented in ideal ways and your revised rationale included the factors that are likely to affect how teachers implement them. By comparing the before and after rationales, you are describing what you learned—what you can explain now that you could not before. Another way of saying this is that you are describing how much more you understand now than before you conducted your study.

Revised predictions based on carefully planned and collected data usually exhibit some of the following features compared with the originals: more precision, more completeness, and broader scope. Revised rationales have more explanatory power and become more complete, more aligned with the new predictions, sharper, and overall more convincing.

Part II. Why Do Educators Do Research?

Doing scientific inquiry is a lot of work. Each phase of the process takes time, and you will often cycle back to improve earlier phases as you engage in later phases. Because of the significant effort required, you should make sure your study is worth it. So, from the beginning, you should think about the purpose of your study. Why do you want to do it? And, because research is a social practice, you should also think about whether the results of your study are likely to be important and significant to the education community.

If you are doing research in the way we have described—as scientific inquiry—then one purpose of your study is to understand , not just to describe or evaluate or report. As we noted earlier, when you formulate hypotheses, you are developing rationales that explain why things might be like they are. In our view, trying to understand and explain is what separates research from other kinds of activities, like evaluating or describing.

One reason understanding is so important is that it allows researchers to see how or why something works like it does. When you see how something works, you are better able to predict how it might work in other contexts, under other conditions. And, because conditions, or contextual factors, matter a lot in education, gaining insights into applying your findings to other contexts increases the contributions of your work and its importance to the broader education community.

Consequently, the purposes of research studies in education often include the more specific aim of identifying and understanding the conditions under which the phenomena being studied work like the observations suggest. A classic example of this kind of study in mathematics education was reported by William Brownell and Harold Moser in 1949 . They were trying to establish which method of subtracting whole numbers could be taught most effectively—the regrouping method or the equal additions method. However, they realized that effectiveness might depend on the conditions under which the methods were taught—“meaningfully” versus “mechanically.” So, they designed a study that crossed the two instructional approaches with the two different methods (regrouping and equal additions). Among other results, they found that these conditions did matter. The regrouping method was more effective under the meaningful condition than the mechanical condition, but the same was not true for the equal additions algorithm.

What do education researchers want to understand? In our view, the ultimate goal of education is to offer all students the best possible learning opportunities. So, we believe the ultimate purpose of scientific inquiry in education is to develop understanding that supports the improvement of learning opportunities for all students. We say “ultimate” because there are lots of issues that must be understood to improve learning opportunities for all students. Hypotheses about many aspects of education are connected, ultimately, to students’ learning. For example, formulating and testing a hypothesis that preservice teachers need to engage in particular kinds of activities in their coursework in order to teach particular topics well is, ultimately, connected to improving students’ learning opportunities. So is hypothesizing that school districts often devote relatively few resources to instructional leadership training or hypothesizing that positioning mathematics as a tool students can use to combat social injustice can help students see the relevance of mathematics to their lives.

We do not exclude the importance of research on educational issues more removed from improving students’ learning opportunities, but we do think the argument for their importance will be more difficult to make. If there is no way to imagine a connection between your hypothesis and improving learning opportunities for students, even a distant connection, we recommend you reconsider whether it is an important hypothesis within the education community.

Notice that we said the ultimate goal of education is to offer all students the best possible learning opportunities. For too long, educators have been satisfied with a goal of offering rich learning opportunities for lots of students, sometimes even for just the majority of students, but not necessarily for all students. Evaluations of success often are based on outcomes that show high averages. In other words, if many students have learned something, or even a smaller number have learned a lot, educators may have been satisfied. The problem is that there is usually a pattern in the groups of students who receive lower quality opportunities—students of color and students who live in poor areas, urban and rural. This is not acceptable. Consequently, we emphasize the premise that the purpose of education research is to offer rich learning opportunities to all students.

One way to make sure you will be able to convince others of the importance of your study is to consider investigating some aspect of teachers’ shared instructional problems. Historically, researchers in education have set their own research agendas, regardless of the problems teachers are facing in schools. It is increasingly recognized that teachers have had trouble applying to their own classrooms what researchers find. To address this problem, a researcher could partner with a teacher—better yet, a small group of teachers—and talk with them about instructional problems they all share. These discussions can create a rich pool of problems researchers can consider. If researchers pursued one of these problems (preferably alongside teachers), the connection to improving learning opportunities for all students could be direct and immediate. “Grounding a research question in instructional problems that are experienced across multiple teachers’ classrooms helps to ensure that the answer to the question will be of sufficient scope to be relevant and significant beyond the local context” (Cai et al., 2019b , p. 115).

As a beginning researcher, determining the relevance and importance of a research problem is especially challenging. We recommend talking with advisors, other experienced researchers, and peers to test the educational importance of possible research problems and topics of study. You will also learn much more about the issue of research importance when you read Chap. 5 .

Exercise 1.7

Identify a problem in education that is closely connected to improving learning opportunities and a problem that has a less close connection. For each problem, write a brief argument (like a logical sequence of if-then statements) that connects the problem to all students’ learning opportunities.

Part III. Conducting Research as a Practice of Failing Productively

Scientific inquiry involves formulating hypotheses about phenomena that are not fully understood—by you or anyone else. Even if you are able to inform your hypotheses with lots of knowledge that has already been accumulated, you are likely to find that your prediction is not entirely accurate. This is normal. Remember, scientific inquiry is a process of constantly updating your thinking. More and better information means revising your thinking, again, and again, and again. Because you never fully understand a complicated phenomenon and your hypotheses never produce completely accurate predictions, it is easy to believe you are somehow failing.

The trick is to fail upward, to fail to predict accurately in ways that inform your next hypothesis so you can make a better prediction. Some of the best-known researchers in education have been open and honest about the many times their predictions were wrong and, based on the results of their studies and those of others, they continuously updated their thinking and changed their hypotheses.

A striking example of publicly revising (actually reversing) hypotheses due to incorrect predictions is found in the work of Lee J. Cronbach, one of the most distinguished educational psychologists of the twentieth century. In 1955, Cronbach delivered his presidential address to the American Psychological Association. Titling it “Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology,” Cronbach proposed a rapprochement between two research approaches—correlational studies that focused on individual differences and experimental studies that focused on instructional treatments controlling for individual differences. (We will examine different research approaches in Chap. 4 ). If these approaches could be brought together, reasoned Cronbach ( 1957 ), researchers could find interactions between individual characteristics and treatments (aptitude-treatment interactions or ATIs), fitting the best treatments to different individuals.

In 1975, after years of research by many researchers looking for ATIs, Cronbach acknowledged the evidence for simple, useful ATIs had not been found. Even when trying to find interactions between a few variables that could provide instructional guidance, the analysis, said Cronbach, creates “a hall of mirrors that extends to infinity, tormenting even the boldest investigators and defeating even ambitious designs” (Cronbach, 1975 , p. 119).

As he was reflecting back on his work, Cronbach ( 1986 ) recommended moving away from documenting instructional effects through statistical inference (an approach he had championed for much of his career) and toward approaches that probe the reasons for these effects, approaches that provide a “full account of events in a time, place, and context” (Cronbach, 1986 , p. 104). This is a remarkable change in hypotheses, a change based on data and made fully transparent. Cronbach understood the value of failing productively.

Closer to home, in a less dramatic example, one of us began a line of scientific inquiry into how to prepare elementary preservice teachers to teach early algebra. Teaching early algebra meant engaging elementary students in early forms of algebraic reasoning. Such reasoning should help them transition from arithmetic to algebra. To begin this line of inquiry, a set of activities for preservice teachers were developed. Even though the activities were based on well-supported hypotheses, they largely failed to engage preservice teachers as predicted because of unanticipated challenges the preservice teachers faced. To capitalize on this failure, follow-up studies were conducted, first to better understand elementary preservice teachers’ challenges with preparing to teach early algebra, and then to better support preservice teachers in navigating these challenges. In this example, the initial failure was a necessary step in the researchers’ scientific inquiry and furthered the researchers’ understanding of this issue.

We present another example of failing productively in Chap. 2 . That example emerges from recounting the history of a well-known research program in mathematics education.

Making mistakes is an inherent part of doing scientific research. Conducting a study is rarely a smooth path from beginning to end. We recommend that you keep the following things in mind as you begin a career of conducting research in education.

First, do not get discouraged when you make mistakes; do not fall into the trap of feeling like you are not capable of doing research because you make too many errors.

Second, learn from your mistakes. Do not ignore your mistakes or treat them as errors that you simply need to forget and move past. Mistakes are rich sites for learning—in research just as in other fields of study.

Third, by reflecting on your mistakes, you can learn to make better mistakes, mistakes that inform you about a productive next step. You will not be able to eliminate your mistakes, but you can set a goal of making better and better mistakes.

Exercise 1.8

How does scientific inquiry differ from everyday learning in giving you the tools to fail upward? You may find helpful perspectives on this question in other resources on science and scientific inquiry (e.g., Failure: Why Science is So Successful by Firestein, 2015).

Exercise 1.9

Use what you have learned in this chapter to write a new definition of scientific inquiry. Compare this definition with the one you wrote before reading this chapter. If you are reading this book as part of a course, compare your definition with your colleagues’ definitions. Develop a consensus definition with everyone in the course.

Part IV. Preview of Chap. 2

Now that you have a good idea of what research is, at least of what we believe research is, the next step is to think about how to actually begin doing research. This means how to begin formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses. As for all phases of scientific inquiry, there are lots of things to think about. Because it is critical to start well, we devote Chap. 2 to getting started with formulating hypotheses.

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Hiebert, J., Cai, J., Hwang, S., Morris, A.K., Hohensee, C. (2023). What Is Research, and Why Do People Do It?. In: Doing Research: A New Researcher’s Guide. Research in Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19078-0_1

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Relevance Of Research – Why Is It So Important?

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Research is a significant element in academia. It is a tool that helps us solve problems, make new discoveries, and understand the world better in general. During the research process , you can make a difference in people’s lives or in society. For this reason, students must complete research papers as part of any course in higher education. This article discusses the relevance of research in different fields of academic writing .

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• 1 In a nutshell: Relevance of research
• 2 Definition: Relevance of research
• 3 How to conduct research
• 4 Relevance of research in different courses
• 5 Types of relevance in research
• 6 Knowledge and learning
• 7 Issues and public awareness
• 8 A successful business
• 9 Lies and truths
• 10 Opportunities
• 11 Information
• 12 Relevance of research: Exercise for the mind

In a nutshell: Relevance of research

• Many academic fields require students to conduct academic research as part of their studies. Overall, research is also applied heavily by students in learning and the academic writing process.
• The key relevance of research in academia is that it allows students and researchers to find sources to make their arguments on a specific topic. Furthermore, most opinions are conceived through the research process.
• Besides students, trained professionals also recognize the relevance of research.

Definition: Relevance of research

Relevance of research refers to the importance of research in various fields. Here are a few reasons why research is relevant:

• It builds knowledge and promotes learning.
• It helps to increase public awareness.
• Research promotes success in business and other fields.
• It encourages the disapproval of lies and supports facts and truths.
• Research is a means for discovering opportunities and helps build credibility.
• It promotes confidence and passion in reading, sharing information, analyzing, and writing.
• Research nourishes and helps exercise the mind.

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How to conduct research

The relevance of research is not a topic of debate. Therefore, students must learn how to research, so they can enjoy the benefits. The following steps explain how to conduct research.

• Choosing a topic and identifying a problem: Firstly, you must come up with ideas and find a general area of interest. Once you are settled on a topic, you must determine an issue that needs to be addressed in the area and why it matters.
• Formulating research questions and creating a research design: Next, you must create one or more research questions that target what you want to find out through your research. Additionally, create a practical framework for answering your research questions (research design).
• Writing a research proposal: Finally, create a research proposal that outlines the relevance of the research, context, purpose, and your plan. From there, you can start searching for sources and gathering information for your research.

Relevance of research in different courses

The relevance of research stands out in different courses. For this reason, most courses encourage their students to apply research in their studies and academic writing. Universities encourage and engage in research as part of their mission to promote learning and discovery.

Let us look at the relevance of research in different courses:

Types of relevance in research

There are different forms of the relevance of research. Let us look at some of the key ones.

Academic relevance

Societal relevance, practical relevance, scientific relevance.

The academic relevance of research is perhaps the most critical. Research is critical in the promotion of academic knowledge of a subject. Moreover, research helps individuals meet their academic goals. Academic relevance comes from learned information, which is obtained through research.

The purpose of research extends beyond academia and has a significant impact on society. Research generates knowledge that aids in addressing real-world problems and making informed decisions. Research provides a more profound understanding of society and its functions.

The relevance of research is also important in everyday life. Research findings apply in real-life situations to various extents. For instance, research allows entrepreneurs to discover problems and wants in society, and the findings help resolve these problems. Researchers make recommendations for particular industries and promote improved processes in critical organizations.

Research allows practitioners in various fields of science to bridge the knowledge gap in various subjects. Research also helps scientists make new and significant discoveries that help advance different fields. Scientists need research to come up with life-changing inventions.

Knowledge and learning

Research helps facilitate knowledge acquisition and learning. Students, academics, professionals, and non-professionals depend on research as a tool for learning and understanding a subject better. Research also equips individuals with information about the world and skills for survival and life improvement.

Issues and public awareness

Research is a tool for understanding issues and raising public awareness. It helps people understand each other and their world. People use research to understand current issues.

A successful business

Research is critical for business success. Successful companies and individuals rely on market and client research. It helps them understand their clients, their needs, and how to provide them with what they need. Therefore, research helps with targeted marketing. It also helps businesses understand their competition and establish ways to stand out.

Lies and truths

Background research and private investigations are critical in debunking lies and promoting truths. Researchers apply field-testing and peer reviews to validate facts. Therefore, research builds integrity and competence in facts. Fact-checking helps discover research bias, fake news, and propaganda.

Opportunities

Research helps people find, gauge, and seize opportunities. Therefore, it helps individuals nurture their potential and achieve goals by taking advantage of opportunities. People can use research to maximize career options and investments.

Information

Research promotes a passion and love for reading, writing, analyzing, and sharing information. It is a tool for critical thinking and comprehension. Sharing research promotes a wider understanding of a subject.

Relevance of research: Exercise for the mind

Research nourishes and exercises the mind. Critical thinking is a tool for promoting mental health. Students earn critical reasoning skills from research, which helps with their learning. Various studies have proven that mentally stimulating activities like research can promote brain health.

What is the meaning of relevance in research?

The relevance of research is the understanding of how studying one thing can affect another. It is the extent to which a specific study or theory is significant.

What are the different types of relevance of research?

The various forms of the relevance of research are:

How does research promote mental health?

Research nourishes and exercises the mind. Critical thinking is a tool for promoting mental health. Students earn critical reasoning skills from research, which helps with their learning.

What is the scientific relevance of research?

Research allows practitioners in various fields of science to bridge the knowledge gap in various subjects. It helps scientists make new and significant discoveries that help advance different fields.

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How do researchers approach societal impact?

Benedikt Fecher

1 Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany

2 German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Berlin, Germany

Marcel Hebing

3 DBU Digital Business University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany

Associated Data

The data underlying this study are available on Kaggle (DOI: 10.34740/kaggle/dsv/2366092 ).

Based on a communication-centered approach, this article examines how researchers approach societal impact, that is, what they think about societal impact in research governance, what their societal goals are, and how they use communication formats. Hence, this study offers empirical evidence on a group that has received remarkably little attention in the scholarly discourse on the societal impact of research—academic researchers. Our analysis is based on an empirical survey among 499 researchers in Germany conducted from April to June 2020. We show that most researchers regard societal engagement as part of their job and are generally in favor of impact evaluation. However, few think that societal impact is a priority at their institution, and even fewer think that institutional communication departments reach relevant stakeholders in society. Moreover, we show that researchers’ societal goals and use of communication formats differ greatly between their disciplines and the types of organization that they work at. Our results add to the ongoing metascientific discourse on the relationship between science and society and offer empirical support for the hypothesis that assessment needs to be sensitive to disciplinary and organizational context factors.

Introduction

Until the 1970s there was no doubt among policymakers that public investment in research would have a positive societal impact. The social contract for science at that time meant that science was granted an unusual degree of autonomy in return for widely diffused benefits to society and the economy [ 1 ]. It was only from the late 1980s onward that researchers were increasingly expected to account for their achievements in evaluation exercises [ 2 – 4 ]. Initially, these focused on intra-scientific (and often bibliometric) impact. In the last decade, however, policymakers have begun to focus more on the societal impact of research and hence on what academic research offers for the economy, society, culture, public administration, health, environment, and overall quality of life [ 2 , 5 , 6 ]. Noteworthy examples indicating the gradual shift from scientific to societal impact in research governance include the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom or the Excellence in Research for Australia Framework (ERA) [ 7 – 9 ]. In the Netherlands, a region with some of the most developed examples of impact governance, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) have implemented guidelines for the evaluation and improvement for research, the Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP). The SEP is used by research institutions to evaluate research units and focuses strongly on relevance for society as well as research quality [ 10 , 11 ]. Societal impact is also a key component in European research funding [ 12 – 14 ].

In Germany, where the present study was conducted, there is no evaluation exercise comparable to the REF, ERA, or SEP. The topic has, however, been prominently discussed: Referring to the announcement that the next EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation will focus more on the societal benefits of research, the Alliance of Science Organisations stated in 2018 that any such evaluation should be differentiated and tailored to the demands of science [ 15 ]. In 2019, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) published a policy paper in which it stipulated that societal impact must become part of the academic reputation logic [ 16 ]. In 2020, it set up a think tank to work out how societal impact could be evaluated [ 17 ]. Also in 2020, the Alliance of Science Organizations issued an agreement containing four fields of action; this highlighted, among other things, scientific freedom and the need to anticipate disciplinary differences. The German Council of Sciences and Humanities, an advisory body to the German federal government, called for “more recognition for knowledge and technology transfer” [ 18 ]. The German Rectors’ Conference, the umbrella organization of German universities, decided at its general assembly (November 14, 2017) that knowledge transfer is a priority for universities [ 19 ]. Besides these developments at the level of science governance in Germany, there are a multitude of institutional initiatives and strategy developments underway. For instance, the Leibniz Association, a union of 96 nonuniversity research institutes, adopted a new mission statement for the transfer of scientific knowledge to society, the economy, and politics in 2019 [ 20 ].

Although there is no evaluation exercise in Germany comparable to the REF in the UK, it is evident that the topic has gained momentum in Germany in recent years as well. In light of complex societal challenges and the further integration of German research bodies into the European research area, the societal impact of research will likely become an even more prominent concern in research governance in the near future. If, as stated above, the old social contract granted science relative freedom in return for widely diffused benefits for society, the new social contract for science imposes accountability for the freedom granted to science [ 21 – 23 ]. This development has been criticized by the scientific community. For example, many associations for the social sciences and humanities in Germany expressed concern that the BMBF initiative does not take into account the current state of science communication research [ 24 ].

If societal impact is to be a new paradigm of science governance, it is important to better understand how societal impact emerges. In this article, we address this question from the perspective of researchers, that is, we ask what their views on societal impact are, what their goals are, and what formats they use to achieve them. Our analysis is based on a survey among 499 researchers in Germany conducted from April to June 2020. Here, we report the key results of this study and reflect on potential implications for science governance. Our results add to the ongoing scholarly discourse on societal impact by offering empirical evidence on a group that has received surprisingly little attention in the scholarly study of societal impact—academic researchers.

Societal impact in research

Two scholarly discourses are particularly relevant for the subject of this study: 1) the discourse in communication and science and technology studies (STS) on the relationship between science and society and 2) the discourse on societal impact measurement in scientometrics and evaluation research. In the following, we will delineate these two discourses and reflect on their implications for this study.

Relationship between science and society: From deficit to dialog

Before the first large-scale impact agendas were implemented, scholars in STS critically examined the nature and role of science in society, drawing on novel concepts of academic knowledge creation such as “Mode 2” [ 25 , 26 ], “academic capitalism” [ 27 ], “post-normal science” [ 28 ] or “Triple Helix” [ 29 ]. Although these concepts differ in their objectives, they generally assume a form of scientific value creation that is no longer self-sufficient and is increasingly interwoven with society. While these conceptualizations do not employ societal impact as an evaluative paradigm, they have paved the way for new thinking about the relationship between science and society. These explorations of the role of science in society were, however, primarily theoretical in nature. Later, entire lines of (communication) research addressed how the public deals with science, for example, the public understanding or awareness of science (PUS, PAwS), scientific literacy, or more recently the public engagement with science and technology (PEST) and the science of science communication [ 30 – 33 ]. In general, research in this area has shifted away from viewing society as an inactive recipient of knowledge—for example, in the so-called “deficit model of science communication” [ 34 ]—and towards envisaging more complex and interactive forms of knowledge creation and dissemination [ 3 , 35 – 37 ].

While there is a considerable body of literature on how the public perceives research, less attention has been paid to the institutional conditions for engagement and how researchers themselves deal with the public. Regarding these institutional conditions, scholars have observed a certain decoupling of central communication infrastructures at institutions and the researchers working there [ 38 , 39 ]. Others have pointed to the increased legitimation pressure exerted by research organizations and the increase in PR and marketing [ 40 ]. When it comes to researchers’ dealings with the public, scholars have focused on a) the relationship between science and specific publics—for instance, the media [ 41 , 42 ] or politics [ 41 ], b) the relationship between science and the broader public [ 41 , 43 – 45 ] or c) the communication practices of single disciplines [ 46 , 47 ]. Here, recurring themes include researchers motivations for engaging with the public [ 48 , 49 ], teaching and training [ 50 , 51 ], and institutional conditions [ 52 , 53 ]. Much research on the interfaces between science and society consists of various relevant case studies. Yet, there is a lack of comparable empirical evidence on one particularly decisive group of actors in the dialogical rationale, that is, academic researchers. This explains why, in this study, we focus on researchers and how they approach societal impact.

Measuring societal impact: From economic to broader societal benefit

In scientometrics and the wider field of evaluation research, the shift towards societal impact as an assessment paradigm in science governance has been accompanied by critical reflections. Martin, for example, asked pointedly whether the creation of the REF would create a “Frankenstein monster,” because the costs of conducting the evaluation might outweigh the benefits [ 8 ]. Others have argued that evaluations of societal impact are prone to methodological shortcomings [ 23 , 54 ] and might have unintended behavioral effects [ 55 , 56 ]. In addition, there are two further points of criticism concerning the concept of societal impact: On the one hand, critics point to the inadequate representation of the complexity of science, for example, because impact logics of the natural sciences are used as a yardstick for evaluations [ 6 , 57 ]. In contrast, impact assessments have been described as failing to do justice to transfer activities in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) [ 58 – 60 ]. In recent years, new approaches have been developed that specifically address the SSH [ 6 , 61 , 62 ]. On the other hand, criticism is directed towards the representation of society, whose benefit has often been reduced to economic indicators (e.g., revenue, jobs) and not the broader societal impact [ 5 , 63 ]. However, some evaluation exercises have broadened their scope to include the wider benefits to society [ 2 ].

Recent models for societal impact have tried to incorporate dialog into their conceptions of societal impact. An example of this is Jong et al.’s concept of productive interactions, which proceeds from the assumption that current productive interactions between researchers and societal stakeholders will improve the probability of future societal impact [ 64 ]. In this regard, interactions are deemed productive if encounters between researchers and societal stakeholders lead to knowledge that is academically sound and socially valuable [ 62 , 64 ]. The concept indicates that two quality regimes—a scientific and a societal—are important for deciding on the productiveness of a dialog. It should be noted that science is part of society and both the sciences and their publics have differing ideas about robustness and usefulness [ 32 ]. The notion of societal impact as an (effect of) dialog is useful in the context of this study, because it allows us to move from pure utilization and reception research to examining the anticipated societal impact of researchers. Drawing from the wider field of evaluation research, we examine how academic researchers anticipate the broader societal impact of their research.

Conceptualization of societal impact in this study

Building on the discourse in evaluation research, we refer to broader societal impact, i.e., the benefits that research holds for the economy, individual wellbeing, the environment, and culture [ 2 , 14 ]. According to Bornmann, three main strands of societal impact can be distinguished: First, societal impact as a product (i.e., as an artifact that embodies scientific knowledge), second, societal impact as use (i.e., the adoption of academic knowledge by societal stakeholders), and third, societal impact as benefits (i.e., the effects of the use of research) [ 2 ]. Here we focus on the latter—we consider the desired societal benefits that researchers associate with their work (goals, RQ2) and the formats they use to communicate about their research (formats, RQ3). To further differentiate societal benefits and formats, we conducted a qualitative prestudy (see Method section). To gain a better understanding of how researchers perceive societal impact as a paradigm in research governance, we included questions to elicit respondents’ opinions on the role of societal impact at their institutions and in their work, on whether societal impact should be given more weight in evaluations, and on whether their institutional communication departments are reaching relevant societal stakeholders [ 38 , 39 ] (opinions, RQ1).

Explanatory dimensions

Drawing on De Jong and colleagues and in line with the metascientific discourse on the conception of the relationship between science and society, we see societal impact as the effect of interaction between scientific and societal stakeholders [ 61 , 62 , 64 ]. We hence used a framework for communication inspired by Cohn’s concept of theme-centered interaction [ 65 , 66 ] and Luhman’s notion of meaning [ 67 , 68 ] when deriving our explanatory variables. We differentiated between three dimensions of explanatory variables:

• The content dimension is defined by the researcher’s disciplinary background and their self-assessment as to whether their research is applied or basic. It can be assumed that researchers’ approaches to societal impact varies between disciplines [ 58 – 60 ]. We assumed that a researcher’s disciplinary background would affect their choice of societal goals. We further expected to find differences between researchers who considered themselves applied and those who considered themselves basic researchers—societal impact might play a greater role for applied researchers [ 69 – 73 ]. We therefore assumed that applied researchers would be more supportive of societal impact evaluations and would also be more active in using communication formats.
• The organizational dimension is defined by the type of research organization (i.e., universities, universities of applied sciences, nonuniversity research institutions). The organizational factors influencing societal impact have, with notable exceptions [ 52 , 53 ], been little researched so far. Here, we were particularly interested in differences between various types of public research institutions in Germany (see Method section below). We assumed that researchers at independent institutes would be more active than university researchers in using communication formats because they usually do not have teaching obligations. We further expected researchers who worked at applied science universities to be more active in using collaboration formats.
• The individual dimension is defined by the sociodemographic factors of age, gender, and academic status. Gender and age differences in connection with human agency have been widely researched in the social sciences, also as they pertain to scholarly communication [ 74 – 80 ]. How these relate to researchers’ engagement with society is still little understood. Academic status may have an influence on the use of communication formats, in the sense that high-status academics may be most active in advisory roles.

Research questions

By looking at these dimensions, we aimed to understand how these factors might influence the interaction between scientific and nonscientific actors in terms of the opinions researchers hold, the societal goals they pursue, and the formats they use to communicate about their research. Three research questions guided our analysis and structured the presentation of the results; when analyzing each question, we use our three dimensions of explanatory variables (i.e., content, organization, individual) to structure and compare the results.

• RQ1 : What are researchers’ opinions on societal impact? What differences can be identified along the three dimensions (i.e., content, organization, individual)?

In particular, we were interested in researchers’ perspectives on a) societal engagement as a part of scientific activity, b) whether societal impact should be considered more in research evaluation, c) the performance of institutional communication departments in reaching relevant societal stakeholders, and d) the importance of knowledge transfer at the institutions.

• RQ2 : Which societal goals do researchers aim to achieve with their research? How do these differ along the three dimensions (i.e., content, organization, individual)?

We used the 13 goals that we identified by coding the REF use cases as a framework (e.g., supporting legislative decision making, driving technical innovation, preserving cultural heritage, or protecting the environment).

• RQ3 : Which formats do researchers use to achieve societal impact? How do these differ along the three dimensions (i.e., content, organization, individual)?

Again, we used our coding of the REF use cases as a framework and took a close look at educational offerings, consulting, events, PR, social media, and collaborations.

The institutional review board and data protection officer of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society approved this study. Informed written consent was obtained from the participants in this study. The data was analyzed anonymously. To answer the research questions, we conducted a survey from April to June 2020 among 499 scientists in Germany. In the following, we describe the instrument and its distribution, the sample design, and the analysis of the data. The survey instrument, the aggregated data, and the prestudy (qualitative analysis of REF case studies) can be found on the project’s website ( https://www.impactdistillery.com/2020-impact-survey/ ). The survey was part of a BMBF-funded research project addressing the question of societal impact and its measurability in the social sciences and humanities ( https://www.wihoforschung.de/de/impaqt-2631.php ).

We designed a standardized instrument, consisting of six sections (A: sociodemographics, B: work context, C: knowledge transfer, D: teaching, E: research, F: general questions, G: personality). Here, we report on the largest section (C: knowledge transfer), which covers our three RQs, and use questions from sections A, B, and F for the explanatory analysis.

RQ1 was covered by a set of items (C1) addressing researchers’ attitudes towards societal impact—i.e., their opinions regarding the importance of knowledge transfer as part of scientific activity and at their institutions, their opinions towards a stronger weighting of societal impact in research evaluation, and the performance of their institution’s communication department in reaching relevant societal stakeholders. We used a 5-point Likert scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree) to elicit agreement or disagreement with a statement.

RQ2 (goals) and RQ3 (formats) were implemented as multiple-choice questions (C3 and C5). The answer categories were based on a structuring content analysis of the REF impact case studies, which we carried out as a prestudy in spring 2019. In 2014, the UK became the first country to assess the societal impact of research as part of a national assessment. The REF evaluates societal impact via case studies, which are narratives that describe how research conducted at a higher education institution created a wider societal benefit. Of course, REF impact case studies are written to succeed in the evaluation in question [ 81 ]. Nevertheless, as researchers’ expressions of impact, they provide a suitable textual data basis for developing goal and format categories [ 82 , 83 ]. The REF case studies are available in a public database ( https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/ ). The case studies were analyzed by two coders separately and frequently discussed in the research group in order to achieve intercoder reliability. The main categories of the content analysis were reflected in the questions on societal goals (i.e., What societal impacts do you want to achieve with your research?; 13 items—RQ2) and communication formats (i.e., Which transfer formats have you already used to communicate your results?; 6 items—RQ3). Each question allowed further responses in an open text field—from the few additional responses and the high response rate, we concluded that the identified categories were robust.

To ask about sociodemographic factors (sections A & B), we re-used questions that had already proved useful in a previous survey [ 77 , 80 ]. The range of disciplines we asked about (A5) was based on the classification of the German Research Foundation [ 84 ].

To evaluate the quality and reliability of the survey, we conducted two rounds of pretests. The first round involved topic experts (i.e. fellow meta-researchers) and methodological experts who reviewed both the content and the design of the survey. The second pretest round involved researchers from different disciplines who completed the survey, focusing on its usability and providing us with a first dataset for preliminary analysis and optimization. As a result, we revised descriptions and shortened the survey.

Sample design and distribution

We designed a semi-convenience sample, which means that in principle any researcher with the link to the survey could participate. However, we personally invited certain researchers so that we could adequately cover the explanatory dimensions (i.e., the different organizational settings, disciplines, and career stages in Germany). With this in mind, we applied the following distribution strategy: We contacted the faculty heads of 60 German universities and 60 universities of applied science ( Fachhochschulen ; in the following, we use the short form “applied universities”) and asked them to distribute the survey to researchers in their faculties. We selected the universities and applied universities based on the number of students and chose the 20 largest and the 20 smallest as well as 20 medium-sized ones. Additionally, we contacted the directors of each institute within the biggest German non-university research organizations (in the following shortened to “independent institutes”), i.e., the Max Planck Society, the Leibniz Association, the Helmholtz Association, and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. We also contacted the German Research Association’s (DFG) graduate schools. Despite these efforts, our sample was not probabilistic and we assumed a certain self-selection bias due to the topic of the survey. Second, because the sample consisted of researchers in Germany, the transferability of the results to other research and innovation systems is limited.

The distinction between different types of research organizations (i.e., universities, applied universities, independent institutes) is important for this study. Independent institutes are characteristic of the German research system. They are typically independent of universities and focus on specific fields of research; scientists at these institutions are not obliged to teach. These institutes are typically organized within the Max Planck Society, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, the Fraunhofer Society, and the Leibniz Association. Researchers from independent institutes should in theory be able to devote more resources to transfer activities than researchers at universities and applied universities, as this latter group has teaching obligations. Applied universities are Germany-specific tertiary education and research institutions. They are rather transfer-oriented and usually specialized in certain fields (e.g., arts, technology, or business). Researchers from applied universities typically have the most extensive teaching obligations. However, due to their applied approach, societal impact should presumably play a more central role for researchers at these kinds of institutions.

We conducted the online survey from April to June 2020. Participants were invited with an initial email and one reminder, both including a request to distribute the survey among colleagues.

Sample description

Overall, 841 people started the survey, 534 of whom completed it (63%). In this paper, we focus on those who stated that their primary work location is Germany, leaving us with 499 valid (59%) cases to analyze.

Fig 1 provides an overview of the sample. Our distribution system had the desired effect—respondents from all disciplines and institutions took part. Regarding sociodemographic characteristics, the genders were equally distributed (50% male, 49% female, and 1% others). For ages 18 to 29 there were almost twice as many female as male researchers in the sample, while there were almost twice as many males as females in the 50 to 59 age group. For the 60+ group, there were approximately three times more male than female researchers in the sample (we excluded others due to the small sample size of 1%). This, however, corresponded roughly to the general gender distribution in German academia [ 85 , 86 ].

(1) To what extent do researchers from the three disciplinary groups (natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities) consider their work as basic or applied research? (2) Distribution of the disciplinary groups across the prevailing institutional types. (3) Distribution of the researchers’ sex across age groups. (4) Distribution of disciplinary groups for male and female researchers. The number of participants with other sex was so small that they were not included in these graphs.

60% of our participants worked at universities, 28% at independent institutes, 10% at applied universities, and only 2% at other forms of institutions; hence, when analyzing the organizational dimension, we focused on the three largest types of organizations. Furthermore, we found that 34% were PhD candidates, 25% were postdocs, 11% were academics without a PhD, 25% were professors and 5% were others. Regarding the disciplinary background, we used the classification of the German Research Association (DFG) and merged the disciplines into three groups: 41% of the respondents were from the natural sciences, 35% were from the social sciences, and 26% were from the humanities [ 84 ].

We found very little empirical research that looked at how researchers approach societal impact. Therefore, we conducted an exploratory analysis and focused on descriptive methods. Most of the results are presented as bivariate distributions that cross-tabulate the three dimensions from our conceptual framework with our research questions. For RQ1 (opinions on science communication), we asked respondents about evaluations because these would have practical implications for their working lives. With this particular dependent variable, we calculated a regression model (OLS) to analyze multivariate effects in more detail.

Some of the questions we analyzed were implemented as a 5-point Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree). In general, we considered agreement as the last two answer categories of the scale (agree + strongly agree) and report on this.

In the research section we present the results for the three research questions alongside the three dimensions of the independent variables, i.e., the content dimension, the organizational dimension, and the dimension of a researcher’s individual characteristics.

RQ1—opinion: Individual commitment without an institutional mandate

Overall, 89% of the respondents agree that public engagement is part of scientific activity. 53% agree that societal impact should be given more weight in research evaluations. Only 27% of respondents think that knowledge transfer plays an important role at their institution and that their communication department is reaching relevant stakeholders in society.

Across all disciplinary groups, the respondents largely agree that public engagement is part of scientific activity (from 86% in the natural sciences, 91% in the humanities, to 93% in the social sciences). Respondents vary in their opinions on whether societal impact should be given more weight in research evaluations: Only 40% of the respondents from the natural sciences agree compared to 65% for the social sciences and 58% for the humanities. Applied researchers are more in favor of societal relevance being given greater consideration in evaluations than basic researchers (see Fig 2 ). Only 15% of respondents from the humanities are convinced that their institutional communication departments are reaching relevant stakeholders in society, compared to 30% of natural scientists and 31% of social scientists.

The responses are differentiated by how much the researchers consider their work to be basic or applied research and the three disciplinary groups. The original question text was “How strongly do the following statements apply to you?.” We combined the approving answer categories to calculate the approval rates.

Researchers at applied universities agree that societal relevance should have more weight in evaluation more often than those at independent institutes and universities—the approval rates are 62%, 49%, and 53% respectively. Researchers at universities show the lowest agreement to the statement that knowledge transfer plays an important role at their institution: Only 19% approve compared to 36% at applied universities and 37% at independent institutes. Furthermore, researchers at universities particularly disagree with the statement that their communication departments are able to reach relevant stakeholders in society: Only 15% approve compared to 28% at applied universities and 44% at independent research institutes.

Both male and female researchers regard public engagement as part of scientific activity (89% and 90%). However, female researchers agree that societal relevance should be part of research evaluation more often than male researchers (62% compared to 44%). There are noteworthy differences among academic status groups: 60% of doctoral researchers but only 42% of postdocs and 47% of professors in our sample agree that societal relevance should have more weight in evaluation. Age does not seem to affect opinions on whether public engagement is part of scientific work.

Because of the differences outlined above, we decided to conduct a regression analysis (see Table 1 ). This confirms the descriptive observations: Humanities scholars (p = 0.01) and social scientists (p<0.01) are significantly more likely to agree that societal relevance should be part of research evaluation compared to natural scientists. Furthermore, female researchers (controlled for discipline), applied researchers, and younger researchers are significantly more in favor of including societal relevance in research evaluation.

How does the discipline, gender, age, a, applied-research focus, and the opinion that science communication is an academic task influence a researcher’s opinion on whether or not societal relevance should be taken into account when evaluating research. The regression model was calculated using ordinary least squares. The reference category for the discipline is the natural sciences.

This shows that researchers are generally in favor of societal impact and regard public engagement as part of scientific activity. Fewer researchers, but still many, agree that societal impact should have more weight in research evaluations. However, this assessment differs depending on the researcher’s discipline, their applied or basic research focus, their gender, and their age. It is noteworthy that researchers (especially at universities) do not think that knowledge transfer plays an important role at their institution and that institutional communication departments are reaching relevant societal stakeholders. From this, we infer that societal impact is understood as an individual task for which there is no institutional mandate.

RQ2—goals: Disciplines define societal goals

Overall, researchers’ most important societal goal is to contribute to education (69%), followed by stimulating public discourse (55%). Equal proportions of respondents—37% each—regard contributing to informed political decision-making and to the physical and mental wellbeing of the population as a societal goal associated with their work. Given the choice of the 13 societal goals identified in the qualitative coding exercise, less than 10% of respondents selected contributing to national and/or international security and creating an entertainment offering; we hence excluded these in reporting. Fig 3 provides an overview of the societal goals the respondents could choose from by disciplinary group.

The radar chart illustrates which goals researchers from our three disciplinary groups pursue when communicating with nonscientific audiences. The numbers are based on the question “What social effects do you most likely want to achieve with your research? With my research, I would like to …”. The original question contained two more options (“… contribute to national and/or international security.” and “… create an entertainment offering.”), but these were chosen by less than 10% of the respondents and are therefore excluded.

It is striking that the disciplinary groups have quite different impact profiles: Scholars from the humanities tend to have culture- and discourse-oriented goals, social scientists have discourse-, social-justice-, and policy-oriented goals, and natural scientists have technology-, health-, and environment-oriented goals. Making a contribution to education is by far the most common impact goal across all disciplines (87% for the humanities, 70% for the social sciences, 58% for the natural sciences). For humanities scholars and social scientists, stimulating and supporting public discourse is among the top societal goals (80% for humanities scholars and 74% for social scientists). Furthermore, 62% of humanities scholars consider preserving cultural heritage a goal of their activities; 54% of social scientists consider strengthening the position of disadvantaged groups to be an impact goal. The main goal for natural scientists is to drive technical innovation (59%), followed by making a contribution to education (58%), and contributing to the physical and mental wellbeing of the population (46%). The differences between applied and basic researchers in terms of their societal goals are negligible.

When looking at the different types of organizations, it is noticeable that researchers from applied universities are most economically oriented: 41% of the researchers from universities of applied sciences indicate that they want to contribute to economic value creation (19% at nonuniversity institutions and 17% at universities). In contrast, researchers from independent institutes are most the policy-oriented ones: 54% of the researchers from independent institutes aim to contribute to political decision-making (31% at universities and 37% at applied universities).

Young researchers (age group 18–29 years, mostly PhD students) reported less often that they aim to contribute to public discourse (37% in comparison to 65% for 30–39-year-olds) or political decision-making (21% in comparison to 48% for 40–49-year-olds). When it comes to gender, male researchers are more inclined to pursue goals that are also related to their disciplines and vice versa. For example, technical innovation is a goal for 43% of male researchers and for 20% of female researchers. Female researchers are more interested in supporting minorities (41%) than male researchers (25%). The academic status of the respondents did not have any noteworthy effects on their goals.

From this, we conclude that societal goals are best explained by the disciplinary backgrounds of researchers. While natural scientists chose goals in the spheres of environment and health as well as innovation and economic value creation, social scientists’ goals centred more on civic society and social justice as well as politics and public discourse. Humanities scholars also chose discourse-oriented goals and focused on societal goals in the cultural sphere. Despite the differences in the definition of societal goals, it is noteworthy that making a contribution to education ranks among the top three goals for every disciplinary group. It is also evident that researchers from applied universities tend to be more economically oriented, while researchers from independent institutes tend to be more policy-oriented.

RQ3—formats: University researchers are the least active

The only transfer format that more than half of the respondents (68%) had used in the past are events (i.e., including public lectures, exhibitions, expert panel discussions). The second most used communication format is public relations (i.e., comment pieces in newspapers or interviews)—45% of respondents have used these in the past. This is followed by educational offerings in schools and for civil society (43%), social media communication (38%), advisory formats (33%), and collaborations with nonscientific partners (33%).

It is evident that humanities scholars especially use social media to communicate about their research: 55% of humanities scholars approve of such methods compared to 33% of natural scientists and 38% of social scientists. Social scientists have the most experience with advisory formats: 50% have used them compared to 28% of humanities scholars and 24% of natural scientists. Comparing applied and basic researchers, we noted that basic researchers hardly ever offer advisory formats (14% for basic researchers vs. 47% for applied researchers) or collaborations (17% for primarily basic researchers vs. 39% for primarily applied researchers).

Researchers from applied universities are the primary users of advisory formats: 57% of researchers at applied universities have used advisory formats compared to 40% of researchers at independent institutes and only 26% of the researchers at universities. Only 28% of the researchers from universities have used collaboration formats, compared to 53% of researchers from applied universities and 35% of researchers from independent institutes. As Table 2 shows, university researchers have remarkably low scores on every communication format.

Concerning researchers’ individual characteristics, the analysis shows that social media platforms are used more by younger scientists. Less surprisingly, the older a researcher is, the more likely it is that he or she has ever used a format. Regarding gender differences, more male than female researchers have used advisory formats: 43% of male researchers have done so compared to 24% of female researchers.

To conclude, we find that researchers use a variety of formats to communicate results. There are, however, some interesting differences in usage: Humanities scholars particularly tend to communicate their research via social media. Social scientists are most experienced when it comes to advisory formats. Researchers from applied universities are especially likely to have used advisory and collaboration formats. Younger researchers use social media to communicate about their research more than older researchers, and male researchers particularly tend to use advisory formats. In general, it is noteworthy that university researchers are the least active group for almost any of the formats.

Discussion and conclusions

Societal impact, and hence what academic research offers the economy, society, culture, public administration, health, environment and overall quality of life, is gaining in importance in science governance [ 2 , 5 , 6 ]. Likewise, the topic is on the top of the agenda of prominent policy makers and research organizations in Germany, where our study took place. If science is to be assessed based on its contribution to society, the conditions under which social impact arises should be clear. This article contributes to this discourse by addressing researchers’ perspectives on societal impact, that is, their opinions on societal impact (RQ1), the societal goals they associate with their research (RQ2), and the formats they use to engage with society (RQ3). For this reason, we conducted a survey among 499 researchers in Germany from April to June 2020.

Regarding researchers’ opinions, it is remarkable that the majority of researchers (89%) consider societal engagement to be part of scientific activity. More than half of the researchers (53%) agree that societal impact should be given more weight in evaluations. Even though the majority of researchers regard public engagement as part of scientific work, they are not equally positive about whether societal impact should have more weight in evaluations. One reason for this discrepancy may be that researchers fear that evaluations will lead to additional work or that they will not adequately record their transfer activities [ 23 , 60 , 64 ]. In addition, it is striking that only 27% of the respondents assume that knowledge transfer plays an important role at their institution; also 27% n believe that the institutional communication department is managing to reach relevant stakeholders in society. Humanities scholars (15%) and university researchers (15%) particularly doubt that their communication departments are reaching relevant societal stakeholders. This mirrors previous findings suggesting a certain decoupling between central transfer infrastructures and researchers [ 38 , 39 ] and leads us to hypothesize that there is a certain mismatch between individual and institutional commitment.

Regarding the societal goals that researchers associate with their work, it is noteworthy that contributing to education is by far the most important goal (picked by 69% of the respondents) across all groups, followed by stimulating public discourse (55%) and contributing to informed political decision-making (37%). Moreover, it is apparent that societal goals are subject to disciplinary considerations: We show that scholars from the humanities have culture and discourse-oriented goals, social scientists have discourse-, policy- and social-justice-related goals and natural scientists have innovation- and health-related goals. This supports many theoretical reflections about the epistemic conditions for societal impact and the different roles that disciplines occupy in society [ 36 , 56 , 87 ]. We also find that young researchers (age 18–29) are less keen on stimulating public discourse than older ones (37% in comparison to 65% for 30–39-year-old researchers) or informing political decision-making (21% for young researchers compared to 48% for 40–49-year-old researchers). This can likely be explained by the experience that older researchers have acquired, which might make them especially well placed to influence public and political decision-making.

As far as the formats used for societal outreach are concerned, the most commonly used ones are events (used by 65% of the respondents), followed by public relations via media (45%), and educational formats for schools and civil society groups (43%). Humanities scholars especially use social media to communicate results (55% compared to 33% of natural scientists and 38% of social scientists). Basic researchers do not use advisory formats (14% vs. 47%) or collaborations (17% vs 39%) anything as often as applied researchers. Note that university researchers report remarkably low usage of any communication format compared to researchers at applied universities or at independent institutes. This might be explained by the fact that university researchers have teaching obligations not faced by those at independent institutes and thus less time for engagement activities. However, researchers from applied universities typically have a higher teaching workload. As far as researchers’ individual characteristics are concerned, it is notable that social media is used more by younger researchers, indicating that social media will likely become more important as a means of engagement.

While our results are mainly of a descriptive nature and we do not make normative assumptions about the subject of our research (i.e. “it is good to have more impact”), we can still draw some practical conclusions: First, considering the discontent with institutional communication departments, it might be worthwhile to implement decentralized support structures on the mesolevel of research organizations. This could more adequately address the complexities of the sciences and their many publics [ 5 , 6 , 57 , 63 ]. The findings further suggest that, where applicable, organizational factors (e.g., institutional investments in transfer, training offerings, support infrastructures) should be more strongly incorporated into assessments of societal impact—for example. through formative evaluations [ 88 ]. Second, our results suggest that it is strongly advisable that evaluation exercises are responsive to disciplinary differences. For example, if economic and technical impact were the sole basis for assessing societal impact, social sciences and humanities scholars would be discriminated against [ 6 , 63 ]. Our framework for societal goals and our results can also be the basis for disciplinary self-understanding (e.g., in learned societies), in that they can stimulate a normative discussion about good transfer and its evaluation. Third, considering the comparatively low importance of social media as a means of communicating about research, care should be taken not to overuse online discourse as a way of easily generating impact proxies. Moreover, our findings contribute to an informed discussion in science governance about the constraints of impact evaluation and might help impact officers and communication professionals at universities to reflect on strategies.

Our results add to the ongoing scholarly discourse on societal impact. We think that our results could bring two relevant but still separated discourses closer together, that is, the discourse on impact evaluation and the discourse on science communication/public engagement. It makes sense for critical evaluation research to make use of empirical work on the exchange between science and society. Vice versa, it makes sense to examine how evaluation policies for societal impact might affect researchers’ communication behavior. We further provide initial evidence on potentially relevant research perspectives. This concerns the organization of societal impact at scientific institutions. In addition, we suggest that national innovation systems should be studied comparatively in order to understand the impact of policies and to study more closely the relationship between transfer practices and societal impact in specific disciplines.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Natalya Sokolovska, Sascha Schönig, and Elias Koch for their help in coding the REF impact case studies. We would also like to thank Gert G. Wagner and Ricarda Ziegler for their friendly feedback.

Funding Statement

B.F. received funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (01PW18008A; 01PW18008B; https://www.wihoforschung.de/de/impaqt-2631.php ). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2021; 16(7): e0254006.

Decision Letter 0

24 Mar 2021

PONE-D-21-03474

How Do Researchers Achieve Societal Impact? Results of an Empirical Survey Among Researchers in Germany

Dear Dr. Fecher,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Reviewers agreed that the paper is valuable; however, they suggest several revision points. I advise you to incorporate as many suggestions as possible, and when not possible, please explain why. Please enhance the method section by clearly explain the statistics and the survey. A more detailed introduction and discussion are needed.

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The research topic of the study is relevant both academically and socially. The authors bring out the important question how researchers understand their efforts to engage in non-academic organizations and institutions and their possibilities to achieve social impact via their research organizations. They point out rather interesting results. Statistical research on research impact is clearly underdeveloped and needs more studies like this. However, the manuscript has several major problems in methodical soundness and in the theoretical framework, which is not connecting to the results or to the academic discussion about research impact.

There are four major problems that the paper needs to address:

1. The whole analysis section is missing regarding the statistical analysis. The reader cannot see how the authors conducted the study. There is only one section where the authors uses a regression analysis, while the whole analysis is descriptive. It needs a good reason to ground such an analytical choice. The statistical description requires re-phrasing and the tables need reformulations. It is rather difficult to understand the authors’ writing through these expressions and the table.

2. Because the questionnaire of this research is self-designed, there should be description of its validity and reliability, which are now missing.

3. Because the method, analysis and results are insufficiently presented, I strongly recommend to ask an expert in statistics to re-check and revise these sections. I believe such expertise would help to improve the readability, validity and reliability of this article.

4. The theoretical framework relating to science communication in the manuscript does not connect to the results of the study. The discussion section lacks correspondence to academic discussion about research impact. There are several theoretical approaches to social impact of research or science communication and the authors should point out what point of view their hypothesis and results are supporting. The interpretation of the results lacks a meaningful theoretical framework, although the study presents a framework for science communication. I recommend to structure a hypothesis vis-à-vis science communication and interpret the results by this framework for the study.

I suggest some minor recommendations here:

- I recommend that a professional language service would proof read this article.

- The title of the paper corresponds weakly to the study, as the paper studies people’s opinions and understanding of their engagement, not how they actually achieve impact.

- The study utilizes the categories of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) from the United Kingdom. However, the REF cannot be argued to be without normative assumptions when it is a result of policies. The utilization in analysis needs some theoretical justification for using such criteria for impact.

- Basic and applied distinction is not always clear and divergent disciplines may have differing opinions about this. Use of such distinction needs theoretical support.

- The questionnaire has a section considering respondent’s personality. I cannot see this data in the paper and the meaning of such data for the paper.

- What do the authors mean by: "...by the socio-demographic factors: gender, status, and age."? In addition what “status”, do you mean employment status? Please, be more specific of these terms.

- Expression “In relation to the engagement with society” is unclear. It can be read that research is not part of society.

- Did you select the universities according to your criteria for the selection among all universities in Germany?

- Your description of semi-convenient/convenient sample is not consistent in the paper.

- The result section is rather long, and some parts are quite repetitive. Shortening it could make it more reader-friendly.

- Description of the REF coding needs to be placed in the method section.

- Table 2 title needs to be more specific.

- Table 3 is missing completely.

- What does “sustainable strategy for impact” mean in this context?

- What is specific impact in relation to disciplines? I don't think reference to a policy paper is relevant in discussion part. It should have discussion with the science communication literature or impact literature.

- In the appendix figure, there is a wrong title for the bar chart: basic vs. applied.

Reviewer #2: Thanks for the opportunity to review your manuscript entitled "How do researchers achieve societal impact? Results of an empirical survey among researchers in Germany" in which you have identified and argued for an important research gap. I really enjoyed reading the manuscript and my main comments and suggestions below are merely about elaborating and developing your text a bit more.

Consider the following in your revision of the paper:

INTRODUCTION

In the section SOCIETAL IMPACT IN RESEARCH p 10 ff you may problematize and position your study

more by (i) a deeper description existing research of the different concepts of academic knowledge

creation see e.g., Olsson et al 2020, (2020). A conceptual model for university-society

research collaboration facilitating societal impact for local innovation. European Journal of Innovation

Management. https://doi-org.ezproxy.server.hv.se/10.1108/EJIM-04-2020-0159 and (ii) earlier

research on measuring and defining research impact e.g., De Jong, et al (2014) “Understanding

societal impact through productive interactions: CT research as a case”, Research Evaluation, Vol. 23

No. 2, pp. 89-102; Greenhalgh, T., Jackson, C. et al (2016), “Achieving research impact through co-

creationin community-based health services: literature review and case study”, The Milbank

Quarterly, Vol. 94 No. 2, pp. 392-429; Matsumoto, M., et al (2010), “Development of a model to estimate the economic impacts of R&D output of public research institutes”, R & D Management, Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 91-100. Issues of co-creation in university-society collaboration is also something you may find interesting see e.g., Larsson, J. and Holmberg, J. (2018), “Learning while creating value for sustainability transitions: the case of challenge lab at Chalmers university of technology”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 172, pp. 4411-4420, and Olsson et al 2020 as above.

AIM – there is a slight difference between the aim on page 5 and page 19.

RQ1 includes the words engagement, evaluation and press departments that need further explanation and linked to earlier research in the introduction section.

This is also reoccurring in the Method section p. 7 as the importance of communication and

performance of communication department- is there any earlier research on these aspects then it should be mentioned in the Introduction.

P. 6 define status in the individual dimension.

P. 12 The status groups -presented differently throughout the paper. A logical presentation of the groups is recommended along with an early definition in the paper of how you define a ‘researcher’.

The age of 18 seem to be very young to be included in the group of researchers?

Methodology and results are presented and illustrated in a proper way.

Fig 1 Institutional types- may the categories by merged into three categories instead?

The manuscript ends with a Discussion – add Conclusion in the heading or add another subsection entitled Conclusion. There are very few references in your Discussion. Return to your earlier refences in the Introductions section and compare your findings to earlier research.

Good luck with your revision!

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Reviewer #1:  Yes:  Juha-Pekka Lauronen

Reviewer #2: No

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Author response to Decision Letter 0

Dear Dr. Rozylowicz, dear colleagues,

we were delighted about the positive and helpful reviews we received. We substantially revised the manuscript accordingly.

Submitted filename: response_PONE-D-21-03474.docx

Decision Letter 1

28 May 2021

PONE-D-21-03474R1

How Do Researchers Approach Societal Impact?

The revision greatly improved the paper, and both reviewers had positive comments. However, there is a need for some minor adjustments for greater clarity and better reproducibility. Please try to include the suggestions in your paper, and, if not suitable, please answer in detail why. Also, please proofread the paper carefully before submitting it.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 12 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see:  http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at  https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols .

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

6. Review Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: PONE-D-21-03474R1

The paper and its methodical choices have improved significantly, and that is why, I suggest only some minor revisions by pointing out small possible improvements and recommendations. The study design still has some minor questions related to validity and reliability, which could be clarified and elaborated more. The findings and conclusions of the study are a bit trivial because they do not debate openly with the previous literature and the background literature of the study. Connection to the previous debate could elevate the substantial value of the paper.

1. Pretests: The authors explain that they have done pretests for reliability, but they do not elaborate what result the test provided for reliability, though they explain what they did based on those tests.

2. In the sample design, the authors describe that they selected the universities based on number of students. Why do they not rely it on researchers, teachers and other staff of scholars when the study is about researchers’ attitudes?

3. In the page 19, the expression sounds ambiguous: “Fewer researchers, but still many,…”

4. In the results section (RQ 1) the authors conclude that: “It is noteworthy that researchers (especially at universities) do not think that knowledge transfer plays an important role at their institution and that institutional communication departments are reaching relevant societal stakeholders. From this, we infer that societal impact is understood as an individual task for which there is no institutional mandate.

It is a bit unclear in this argument whether it means understanding of these institutions or the understanding of the researchers in the survey. If this means only the research staff’s attitudes, I suggest to formulate the conclusion differently, so that it is clear that it describes only the staff’s believes. Of course these two dimensions could be compared preferably.

This conclusion of neglected organizational aspects of impact requires information about the actual knowledge transfer activities of the survey institutions, and how much emphasis they have on impact evaluation and practices. Now the authors provide information about general policy recommendations and considerations, but this does not describe what kind of practices the universities have regarding impact requirements, their organization and evaluation, and their relationship with the survey attitudes.

Perhaps, the authors could provide some basic information of how impact is considered in the university and research work in Germany.

5. The claim “but these were chosen by less than 10% of the respondents

and are therefore excluded” is mentioned twice in the same context.

6. In the results (RQ2), the authors claim that “It is striking that the disciplinary groups have quite different impact profiles: Scholars from the humanities tend to have culture- and discourse-oriented goals, social scientists have discourse-, social-justice-, and policy-oriented goals, and natural scientists have technology-, health-, and environment-oriented goals.

This claim is one of the main results in the paper. However, there is nothing striking in this argument according to common knowledge of disciplinary practices and recent studies on research impact and public engagement. Perhaps, the authors could emphasize how these findings support previous understanding of the characteristics of these disciplines and their public engagement.

7. Then the authors conclude that: “From this, we conclude that societal goals are best explained by the disciplinary backgrounds of researchers.”

Because several authors have already pointed out this argument in recent literature (e.g. Benneworth) and in older classics (e.g. Weiss), the authors could elaborate this statement by linking it to recent literature, which is worried about impact policies neglecting such disciplinary goals and their importance.

8. The results (RQ3) bring out education offerings as an important perception of impact. I was wondering why this does not seem to consider the education of the institutions themselves, as they provide a great number of new graduates for employment each year.

9. Usually some sort of limits of the study should be brought out in the conclusions.

10. The conclusions seem a bit unfinished. Maybe the main conclusion is that disciplines have had their own impact goals in relation to contemporary society all along, and now all the responsibilities are suddenly pressured against researchers without proper institutional structures. On the other hand, what are the impact goals of the organizations and do they correspond to disciplines’ goals? As I pointed out in the sixth comment, linking the findings to recent studies on the disputes about impact goals and neglection of disciplinary goals, to older discussion about the difference between research utilization of various academic fields and to the structural/organizational levels of research impact could benefit and increase the value of the paper.

10. The authors point out: certain mismatch between individual and institutional commitment. However, what are the actual institutional demands from individuals?

11. I find this interesting: "Humanities scholars especially use social media to communicate results."

Perhaps, the authors could speculate a bit why the survey has such a surprising result.

12. This is unclear: researchers have teaching obligations not faced by those at independent institutes and thus less time for engagement activities. However, researchers from applied universities typically have a higher teaching workload.

What does this mean regarding engagement activities?

13. I find this statement unnecessary, as the paper clearly has a normative tone: While our results are mainly of a descriptive nature and we do not make normative assumptions about the subject of our research (i.e. “it is good to have more impact…

14. “The findings further suggest that, where applicable, organizational factors (e.g., institutional investments in transfer, training offerings, support infrastructures) should be more strongly incorporated into assessments of societal impact”

I don’t understand how the authors came to this conclusions. Why should they be part of assessments of impact? Why is impact assessment the perfect way to promote public engagement? There are also other ways to organize and promote knowledge in society.

15. This gives a misleading impression that innovation is same than impact: “In addition, we suggest that national innovation systems should be studied comparatively in order to understand the impact of policies and to study more closely the relationship between transfer practices and societal impact in specific disciplines.”

Some minor notions:

- “An example of this is Jong et al.'s concept of productive interactions…”

Productive interactions is a concept of Spaapen and van Drooge (2011).

- “According to Bornmann, three main strands of societal impact can be distinguished:”.

This is probably de Jong et al. (2014) interpretation based on Bornmann’s conceptualization.

- The instrument: “Nevertheless, as researchers’ expressions of impact, they provide a suitable textual data basis for developing goal and format categories”

Some studies (Watermeyer et al.) have shown that the REF case studies construct unsophisticated imaginaries of impact. This problematics could be mentioned regarding the evaluation competition.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article ( what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Author response to Decision Letter 1

14 Jun 2021

Again, thank you for this valuable and constructive feedback which we feel added substantially to the quality of the paper!

Submitted filename: Response_to_reviewers_PONE-D-21-03474.docx

Decision Letter 2

18 Jun 2021

PONE-D-21-03474R2

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Acceptance letter

Dear Dr. Fecher:

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Importance of research in our society/in different disciplines

Importance of research

Research is the  process by which we seek the solution to a problem  or the answer to something that we do not know in a systematic way. In this sense, research is the fruit of human curiosity, of the need to know and explain nature. Importance of research in our society

The  importance of research  lies in the fact that it has been a key instrument for the progress of humanity.

We must bear in mind that research is not limited to science, all areas of knowledge are the object of constant investigation. In this way progress is achieved. Thus we have that in economics, education, law, and even in art, research stimulates the development of the professional heritage.

Importance of research in our society

In general, any investigation has the following functions:

Knowledge expansion

We do research to find out more. The greatest usefulness of research we can say is the  production of new knowledge  over the existing one. Knowledge, then, is dynamic and growing.

Let’s imagine that since 1900 no research had been done, how would we live in the 21st century? We would still ride in wagons, infant mortality would be enormous, we would die from tuberculosis and measles, we would not have television and much less the Internet. Importance of research in our society

Know the truth

Doubt and disagreement are the great promoters of many investigations. The knowledge of the truth, of how nature works, of how to explain our reality is largely the product of researchers dedicated to satisfying their questions .

From the investigations of Lynn Margullis (1938-2011) the  endosymbiotic theory  could be established as the origin of eukaryotic cells. She showed evidence that prokaryotic organisms established symbiotic relationships and from there arose eukaryotic algae and plants.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the sun and other stars. This fact was discovered by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) in her astronomical research . Importance of research in our society

Improve Life Quality

Electricity is essential in our daily routines. Less than 300 years ago it was a phenomenon unknown to most of the population . Starting with Benjamin Franklin’s famous experience of the lightning bolt and kite, going through the invention of the light bulb by Thomas Edison and the creation of electric generators, it is unthinkable to be able to live in our modern societies without electricity.

Explore history

The investigation in this case is based on investigating what the past was like and the events that led us to the present moment.

For example, the disappearance of the Mayan civilization is one of the greatest mysteries in history. Through archaeological searches, several theories have been proposed to explain what happened to the Mayan population hundreds of years ago. Importance of research in our society

Many times we have made mistakes due to lack of research . One of the most regrettable recent cases is that of thalidomide. Due to lack of research on the effects of this drug on fetal development, thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant women between 1956 and 1962 to reduce the discomforts of pregnancy.

Shortly thereafter, the use of thalidomide during pregnancy was found to affect arm and leg development in children. Thanks to this event, drug research on fetal growth became mandatory before its commercialization.

Favor the progress of humanity

Humanity has benefited enormously from research work, mainly in the area of ​​health and hygiene.

Jonas Salk (1914-1995) was the doctor and researcher who discovered the vaccine against polio, a disease produced by a virus. In 1951, Salk injected dead polio viruses into volunteers, eliminating the danger of the person being infected. This vaccine stimulated the immune system to produce protective proteins, called antibodies. Importance of research in our society

A few years later, the research of Albert Sabin (1906-1993) led to the production of a polio vaccine that was not only cheaper to produce but could also be administered by mouth. Thanks to these two great researchers, in 1994 the World Health Organization decreed the eradication of polio in the Western Hemisphere.

New discoveries

Contrary to what many believe, discoveries and inventions do not happen out of nowhere. Behind every invention or discovery there is a conscious search, in order to find improvements.

For example, bacteria defend themselves against viruses using small pieces of DNA called CRISPR. The discovery of the defense mechanisms of bacteria against viruses has led to the development of DNA editing techniques, known as CRISPR / Cas9. This technique has great potential in curing genetic diseases, cancer prevention and resistance against plant pests.

Why is research important?

There are many reasons why research , in any area of ​​human endeavor, is important. Let’s see some.

Fight misinformation and lack of information

Sometimes they give us false or misrepresented information , intentionally or not. If we are not aware that the information is incorrect, we may accept it right away. If in doubt, we must confirm this information in other sources. Importance of research in our society

It can also happen that there is no information about what we are interested in. Then, through research , we will be able to investigate and produce new information, which later someone else can corroborate in the future.

Stimulates critical thinking

When we are presented with a problem, we must have an open mind and receptive to all kinds of information . However, not all the information is correct or available. When we learn to investigate,  we also learn to think and develop our critical spirit  . These are skills that we must reinforce, especially in this age of information bombardment through social media.

Usefulness and development of knowledge

When we investigate, we seek deep down a profit , an advance in our knowledge. For example, in education, research is carried out that seeks to improve the ability of students to learn and develop new learning techniques. Importance of research in our society

In marketing, research techniques are used in order to study the consumer public and get more customers for a certain product. Data mining, a recent field of research , is based on studying the data generated by different human activities, with the intention of influencing human behavior.

Understanding, prediction and prevention

When investigating a phenomenon, we seek to understand its roots and try to manipulate it to our advantage. Human beings have been learning to establish connections between events and to discover the practical importance of being able to make predictions about the future behavior of things.

Mario Molina, the first Mexican to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1974 showed that the ozone layer in the atmosphere was being affected by chlorofluorocarbons. This layer works as a barrier against harmful ultraviolet rays. Thanks to their research , a global agreement was reached to prevent the increase in the ozone layer gap.

Take decisions

When we do research on matters that affect us, we have a better basis for making decisions . For example, if we like journalism, the most reasonable thing is to investigate which is the best university in this area , in what specialty we would like to train, or if there is any other career that would suit us better. Importance of research in our society

Importance of scientific research

Science is, essentially, systematic and correctable knowledge of nature, man and society. It is the result of a collective work of acquisition, accumulation and use of this knowledge . In the words of Mario Bunge, physicist and science researcher:

“Scientific research begins at the very place where ordinary experience and knowledge cease to solve problems or even pose them.”

We live in a world that depends on science and technology. A fundamental moment of scientific research is the definition and delimitation of the problem and the development of conjectures, hypotheses or anticipations of meaning around it.

Diagnosis and treatment of diseases

Science needs research to study the mechanisms by which diseases occur, and the means to combat or prevent them. Thanks to discoveries in physics, diseases can be diagnosed with the use of X-rays and nuclear magnetic resonance. Importance of research in our society

New Materials

Plastics and synthetic fibers are the product of scientific research in chemistry.

Importance of technological research

Technology also benefits from research . Solar panels and wind turbines would not be necessary without basic research on the deterioration of the environment due to the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels.

We know that atmospheric carbon dioxide has a major impact on global warming . Technologies for its capture and sequestration are currently being investigated in order to reduce its effect as a greenhouse gas.

However, more research is urgently required to produce technological options that allow sustainable economic development, preventing climate change.

Importance of research in everyday life

Day-to-day problems share something in common with scientific problems: the  need to find solutions to difficult situations  . As such, everyday problems benefit from the application of the scientific method. Importance of research in our society

Although we may not realize it, we regularly conduct investigations in our work. Recognizing a problem is the first step in solving it. Once we have recognized that there is a problem, observation is required to find a solution.

We can obtain information from different sources: books , past experience, Internet search, personal communications.

Meet our pets

If we want to have a pet, such as a dog or a cat, the first thing we must do is investigate everything about it. It is very important to know about their breed, their behavior, the foods they can or cannot eat, among others. For example, researching about the foods that dogs cannot consume, we realize that chocolate, onion and garlic are toxic for them.

Impact of the microwave on food

There is some concern in the popular imagination that microwave cooking is unhealthy. When we dig deeper into that problem, we find that microwave cooking is not only faster, but also better preserves nutrients. Importance of research in our society

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Importance of research

Most of the people have an image in their minds that research is a tiresome, tedious and tortuous work meant only for people with scientific background, but it’s not. Students, businessman, historians, writers and even the government engages in research activities in order to start a new assignment or improve the one that they have already started. Right from academics to the commerce, we need quality research to ensure the felicitous working of our project.
 Here we are going to discuss the importance of research in miscellaneous fields and in doing so, we’ll reflect the light on “Why and how to conduct a research?”



WHAT IS RESEARCH?

Need to write an article? Preparing to start a new business? Or planning to expand the horizons of your work area? You’ll need to do some preparation before embarking it but what is this preparation exactly. It’s called research.

It can be stated as
,

Research is the erudite inquiry of new insight, or innovative liveliness in an area with the ambition of advancing that area’s confines

Research is all about assimilating your facts right, collecting new data to modify the project and meliorate the quality as per need. It can be conducted in several forms. One form of research implicates cultivating cutting-edge comprehension through field work, experiments and direct/indirect observations. This is called Original Research. While another form is gathering, analyzing, and summarizing the existing data in such a way that the final report aid to fulfill the needs of the researcher.

WHY TO RESEARCH?

Prior to commence something new, it is better to stock and get acquainted with all the necessary resources involved in the upcoming processes. Since research is a broad term, we’re presenting some reasons to ‘Why research?’ for individuals of different professions


STUDENTS – In the real world, textbook’s theorem and knowledge are of no use, if not applied. Research provides a wider approach to understand a subject. Novel ideas are born and the essentials to foundation of a subject are acquired. One may assume that research is optional, but it actually is a need. The sluggish ones opt it out and suffer the consequences in future.



JOURNALIST/WRITERS – Do you read newspaper or watch news? If yes, then you must’ve read/watched a detailed report of an issue/achievement/crime. Precedent to writing an article, it is a must to stash the facts in mind, read some reference articles and to get opinions from people relevant to the article. Every single thing sums up to deliver a quality text.

BUSINESSMEN – It is always beneficial to invest time and money in researching about every single aspect of the business plan before diving into to the ocean of business. Exploring out how to make things happen and what could signify them from others that propose similar merchandise and services can raise the company’s market repute. Certainly, having accordant intelligence in attaining a sound commercial respect through vibrant business policies like investing in Research & Development can hike its profitability.

The list goes on and on but we are halting here and proceeding towards the other factors regarding ‘Research’.

HOW TO RESEARCH?

Research begins with an issue that comes from an observation. Observations raises questions, and answers to these questions are hunted by researchers which end up with an established fact or hypothesis followed by an experiment. The results of the experiment ultimately allow to take better decisions and gain more knowledge about the research stream. Proper results can only be achieved if the research is conducted in a mannerly format. 
A standard procedure to proceed with researching is as follows

• Observe and identify your problem. Determine the topic, estimate the depth of it and formulate questions

• Prepare a research plan. List out all the actions that you’ll be taking for the smooth execution of your actions.

• Consider your resources and tools that you can utilize in the process

•Collect the relevant data and information through surveys, interviewing the experienced and concerning persons.

• Analyze the data, organize it and report the discoveries.

• Take action. Now that you’ve completed your research its time to take some rigid and firm steps.

Now you have the data and all the pieces to solve the puzzle of research.

BENEFITS OF RESEARCH

Research is associated with minute activities of our routine life on a large scale. Most of the people aren’t aware of it. Let’s see what are the benefits of research:

• Leads to great observation – Conclusion can only be achieved if you’ve observed the facts and the numbers in depth.

• Brings consistency in work – The flaws and mistakes are lessened in the process of the final outcome. The work tends to be right and accurate due to the significant analysis of the acquired data.

• Reveals secrets – Clouds of myths and lie clear out once the shine of research report fall on it. One gets to know the hidden truths about the subjects and it eases the way ahead.

• Updates about the present scenario – Researches aware us about the latest information in the market. It also helps in predicting about what new is going to come in the market.

• Helps in decision making – A point comes into everyone’s life when one has to choose between two paths, when one has to take decision. Research helps in this decision making.

So this was all about research and its importance. Thanks for reading. We hope you liked the article. 
Happy researching!

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National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Your environment. your health., what is ethics in research & why is it important, by david b. resnik, j.d., ph.d..

December 23, 2020

The ideas and opinions expressed in this essay are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the NIH, NIEHS, or US government.

When most people think of ethics (or morals), they think of rules for distinguishing between right and wrong, such as the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), a code of professional conduct like the Hippocratic Oath ("First of all, do no harm"), a religious creed like the Ten Commandments ("Thou Shalt not kill..."), or a wise aphorisms like the sayings of Confucius. This is the most common way of defining "ethics": norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Most people learn ethical norms at home, at school, in church, or in other social settings. Although most people acquire their sense of right and wrong during childhood, moral development occurs throughout life and human beings pass through different stages of growth as they mature. Ethical norms are so ubiquitous that one might be tempted to regard them as simple commonsense. On the other hand, if morality were nothing more than commonsense, then why are there so many ethical disputes and issues in our society?

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One plausible explanation of these disagreements is that all people recognize some common ethical norms but interpret, apply, and balance them in different ways in light of their own values and life experiences. For example, two people could agree that murder is wrong but disagree about the morality of abortion because they have different understandings of what it means to be a human being.

Most societies also have legal rules that govern behavior, but ethical norms tend to be broader and more informal than laws. Although most societies use laws to enforce widely accepted moral standards and ethical and legal rules use similar concepts, ethics and law are not the same. An action may be legal but unethical or illegal but ethical. We can also use ethical concepts and principles to criticize, evaluate, propose, or interpret laws. Indeed, in the last century, many social reformers have urged citizens to disobey laws they regarded as immoral or unjust laws. Peaceful civil disobedience is an ethical way of protesting laws or expressing political viewpoints.

Another way of defining 'ethics' focuses on the disciplines that study standards of conduct, such as philosophy, theology, law, psychology, or sociology. For example, a "medical ethicist" is someone who studies ethical standards in medicine. One may also define ethics as a method, procedure, or perspective for deciding how to act and for analyzing complex problems and issues. For instance, in considering a complex issue like global warming , one may take an economic, ecological, political, or ethical perspective on the problem. While an economist might examine the cost and benefits of various policies related to global warming, an environmental ethicist could examine the ethical values and principles at stake.

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Many different disciplines, institutions , and professions have standards for behavior that suit their particular aims and goals. These standards also help members of the discipline to coordinate their actions or activities and to establish the public's trust of the discipline. For instance, ethical standards govern conduct in medicine, law, engineering, and business. Ethical norms also serve the aims or goals of research and apply to people who conduct scientific research or other scholarly or creative activities. There is even a specialized discipline, research ethics, which studies these norms. See Glossary of Commonly Used Terms in Research Ethics and Research Ethics Timeline .

There are several reasons why it is important to adhere to ethical norms in research. First, norms promote the aims of research , such as knowledge, truth, and avoidance of error. For example, prohibitions against fabricating , falsifying, or misrepresenting research data promote the truth and minimize error.

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Second, since research often involves a great deal of cooperation and coordination among many different people in different disciplines and institutions, ethical standards promote the values that are essential to collaborative work , such as trust, accountability, mutual respect, and fairness. For example, many ethical norms in research, such as guidelines for authorship , copyright and patenting policies , data sharing policies, and confidentiality rules in peer review, are designed to protect intellectual property interests while encouraging collaboration. Most researchers want to receive credit for their contributions and do not want to have their ideas stolen or disclosed prematurely.

Third, many of the ethical norms help to ensure that researchers can be held accountable to the public . For instance, federal policies on research misconduct, conflicts of interest, the human subjects protections, and animal care and use are necessary in order to make sure that researchers who are funded by public money can be held accountable to the public.

Fourth, ethical norms in research also help to build public support for research. People are more likely to fund a research project if they can trust the quality and integrity of research.

Finally, many of the norms of research promote a variety of other important moral and social values , such as social responsibility, human rights, animal welfare, compliance with the law, and public health and safety. Ethical lapses in research can significantly harm human and animal subjects, students, and the public. For example, a researcher who fabricates data in a clinical trial may harm or even kill patients, and a researcher who fails to abide by regulations and guidelines relating to radiation or biological safety may jeopardize his health and safety or the health and safety of staff and students.

Codes and Policies for Research Ethics

Given the importance of ethics for the conduct of research, it should come as no surprise that many different professional associations, government agencies, and universities have adopted specific codes, rules, and policies relating to research ethics. Many government agencies have ethics rules for funded researchers.

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• US Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• Singapore Statement on Research Integrity
• American Chemical Society, The Chemist Professional’s Code of Conduct
• Code of Ethics (American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science)
• American Psychological Association, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct
• Statement on Professional Ethics (American Association of University Professors)
• Nuremberg Code
• World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki

Ethical Principles

The following is a rough and general summary of some ethical principles that various codes address*:

Strive for honesty in all scientific communications. Honestly report data, results, methods and procedures, and publication status. Do not fabricate, falsify, or misrepresent data. Do not deceive colleagues, research sponsors, or the public.

Objectivity

Strive to avoid bias in experimental design, data analysis, data interpretation, peer review, personnel decisions, grant writing, expert testimony, and other aspects of research where objectivity is expected or required. Avoid or minimize bias or self-deception. Disclose personal or financial interests that may affect research.

Keep your promises and agreements; act with sincerity; strive for consistency of thought and action.

Carefulness

Avoid careless errors and negligence; carefully and critically examine your own work and the work of your peers. Keep good records of research activities, such as data collection, research design, and correspondence with agencies or journals.

Share data, results, ideas, tools, resources. Be open to criticism and new ideas.

Transparency

Disclose methods, materials, assumptions, analyses, and other information needed to evaluate your research.

Accountability

Take responsibility for your part in research and be prepared to give an account (i.e. an explanation or justification) of what you did on a research project and why.

Intellectual Property

Honor patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property. Do not use unpublished data, methods, or results without permission. Give proper acknowledgement or credit for all contributions to research. Never plagiarize.

Confidentiality

Protect confidential communications, such as papers or grants submitted for publication, personnel records, trade or military secrets, and patient records.

Responsible Publication

Publish in order to advance research and scholarship, not to advance just your own career. Avoid wasteful and duplicative publication.

Responsible Mentoring

Help to educate, mentor, and advise students. Promote their welfare and allow them to make their own decisions.

Respect for Colleagues

Respect your colleagues and treat them fairly.

Social Responsibility

Strive to promote social good and prevent or mitigate social harms through research, public education, and advocacy.

Non-Discrimination

Avoid discrimination against colleagues or students on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or other factors not related to scientific competence and integrity.

Maintain and improve your own professional competence and expertise through lifelong education and learning; take steps to promote competence in science as a whole.

Know and obey relevant laws and institutional and governmental policies.

Animal Care

Show proper respect and care for animals when using them in research. Do not conduct unnecessary or poorly designed animal experiments.

Human Subjects protection

When conducting research on human subjects, minimize harms and risks and maximize benefits; respect human dignity, privacy, and autonomy; take special precautions with vulnerable populations; and strive to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly.

* Adapted from Shamoo A and Resnik D. 2015. Responsible Conduct of Research, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press).

Ethical Decision Making in Research

Although codes, policies, and principles are very important and useful, like any set of rules, they do not cover every situation, they often conflict, and they require interpretation. It is therefore important for researchers to learn how to interpret, assess, and apply various research rules and how to make decisions and act ethically in various situations. The vast majority of decisions involve the straightforward application of ethical rules. For example, consider the following case:

The research protocol for a study of a drug on hypertension requires the administration of the drug at different doses to 50 laboratory mice, with chemical and behavioral tests to determine toxic effects. Tom has almost finished the experiment for Dr. Q. He has only 5 mice left to test. However, he really wants to finish his work in time to go to Florida on spring break with his friends, who are leaving tonight. He has injected the drug in all 50 mice but has not completed all of the tests. He therefore decides to extrapolate from the 45 completed results to produce the 5 additional results.

Many different research ethics policies would hold that Tom has acted unethically by fabricating data. If this study were sponsored by a federal agency, such as the NIH, his actions would constitute a form of research misconduct , which the government defines as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" (or FFP). Actions that nearly all researchers classify as unethical are viewed as misconduct. It is important to remember, however, that misconduct occurs only when researchers intend to deceive : honest errors related to sloppiness, poor record keeping, miscalculations, bias, self-deception, and even negligence do not constitute misconduct. Also, reasonable disagreements about research methods, procedures, and interpretations do not constitute research misconduct. Consider the following case:

Dr. T has just discovered a mathematical error in his paper that has been accepted for publication in a journal. The error does not affect the overall results of his research, but it is potentially misleading. The journal has just gone to press, so it is too late to catch the error before it appears in print. In order to avoid embarrassment, Dr. T decides to ignore the error.

Dr. T's error is not misconduct nor is his decision to take no action to correct the error. Most researchers, as well as many different policies and codes would say that Dr. T should tell the journal (and any coauthors) about the error and consider publishing a correction or errata. Failing to publish a correction would be unethical because it would violate norms relating to honesty and objectivity in research.

There are many other activities that the government does not define as "misconduct" but which are still regarded by most researchers as unethical. These are sometimes referred to as " other deviations " from acceptable research practices and include:

• Publishing the same paper in two different journals without telling the editors
• Submitting the same paper to different journals without telling the editors
• Not informing a collaborator of your intent to file a patent in order to make sure that you are the sole inventor
• Including a colleague as an author on a paper in return for a favor even though the colleague did not make a serious contribution to the paper
• Discussing with your colleagues confidential data from a paper that you are reviewing for a journal
• Using data, ideas, or methods you learn about while reviewing a grant or a papers without permission
• Trimming outliers from a data set without discussing your reasons in paper
• Using an inappropriate statistical technique in order to enhance the significance of your research
• Bypassing the peer review process and announcing your results through a press conference without giving peers adequate information to review your work
• Conducting a review of the literature that fails to acknowledge the contributions of other people in the field or relevant prior work
• Stretching the truth on a grant application in order to convince reviewers that your project will make a significant contribution to the field
• Stretching the truth on a job application or curriculum vita
• Giving the same research project to two graduate students in order to see who can do it the fastest
• Overworking, neglecting, or exploiting graduate or post-doctoral students
• Failing to keep good research records
• Failing to maintain research data for a reasonable period of time
• Making derogatory comments and personal attacks in your review of author's submission
• Promising a student a better grade for sexual favors
• Using a racist epithet in the laboratory
• Making significant deviations from the research protocol approved by your institution's Animal Care and Use Committee or Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research without telling the committee or the board
• Not reporting an adverse event in a human research experiment
• Wasting animals in research
• Exposing students and staff to biological risks in violation of your institution's biosafety rules
• Sabotaging someone's work
• Stealing supplies, books, or data
• Rigging an experiment so you know how it will turn out
• Making unauthorized copies of data, papers, or computer programs
• Owning over $10,000 in stock in a company that sponsors your research and not disclosing this financial interest
• Deliberately overestimating the clinical significance of a new drug in order to obtain economic benefits

These actions would be regarded as unethical by most scientists and some might even be illegal in some cases. Most of these would also violate different professional ethics codes or institutional policies. However, they do not fall into the narrow category of actions that the government classifies as research misconduct. Indeed, there has been considerable debate about the definition of "research misconduct" and many researchers and policy makers are not satisfied with the government's narrow definition that focuses on FFP. However, given the huge list of potential offenses that might fall into the category "other serious deviations," and the practical problems with defining and policing these other deviations, it is understandable why government officials have chosen to limit their focus.

Finally, situations frequently arise in research in which different people disagree about the proper course of action and there is no broad consensus about what should be done. In these situations, there may be good arguments on both sides of the issue and different ethical principles may conflict. These situations create difficult decisions for research known as ethical or moral dilemmas . Consider the following case:

Dr. Wexford is the principal investigator of a large, epidemiological study on the health of 10,000 agricultural workers. She has an impressive dataset that includes information on demographics, environmental exposures, diet, genetics, and various disease outcomes such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease (PD), and ALS. She has just published a paper on the relationship between pesticide exposure and PD in a prestigious journal. She is planning to publish many other papers from her dataset. She receives a request from another research team that wants access to her complete dataset. They are interested in examining the relationship between pesticide exposures and skin cancer. Dr. Wexford was planning to conduct a study on this topic.

Dr. Wexford faces a difficult choice. On the one hand, the ethical norm of openness obliges her to share data with the other research team. Her funding agency may also have rules that obligate her to share data. On the other hand, if she shares data with the other team, they may publish results that she was planning to publish, thus depriving her (and her team) of recognition and priority. It seems that there are good arguments on both sides of this issue and Dr. Wexford needs to take some time to think about what she should do. One possible option is to share data, provided that the investigators sign a data use agreement. The agreement could define allowable uses of the data, publication plans, authorship, etc. Another option would be to offer to collaborate with the researchers.

The following are some step that researchers, such as Dr. Wexford, can take to deal with ethical dilemmas in research:

What is the problem or issue?

It is always important to get a clear statement of the problem. In this case, the issue is whether to share information with the other research team.

What is the relevant information?

Many bad decisions are made as a result of poor information. To know what to do, Dr. Wexford needs to have more information concerning such matters as university or funding agency or journal policies that may apply to this situation, the team's intellectual property interests, the possibility of negotiating some kind of agreement with the other team, whether the other team also has some information it is willing to share, the impact of the potential publications, etc.

What are the different options?

People may fail to see different options due to a limited imagination, bias, ignorance, or fear. In this case, there may be other choices besides 'share' or 'don't share,' such as 'negotiate an agreement' or 'offer to collaborate with the researchers.'

How do ethical codes or policies as well as legal rules apply to these different options?

The university or funding agency may have policies on data management that apply to this case. Broader ethical rules, such as openness and respect for credit and intellectual property, may also apply to this case. Laws relating to intellectual property may be relevant.

Are there any people who can offer ethical advice?

It may be useful to seek advice from a colleague, a senior researcher, your department chair, an ethics or compliance officer, or anyone else you can trust. In the case, Dr. Wexford might want to talk to her supervisor and research team before making a decision.

After considering these questions, a person facing an ethical dilemma may decide to ask more questions, gather more information, explore different options, or consider other ethical rules. However, at some point he or she will have to make a decision and then take action. Ideally, a person who makes a decision in an ethical dilemma should be able to justify his or her decision to himself or herself, as well as colleagues, administrators, and other people who might be affected by the decision. He or she should be able to articulate reasons for his or her conduct and should consider the following questions in order to explain how he or she arrived at his or her decision:

• Which choice will probably have the best overall consequences for science and society?
• Which choice could stand up to further publicity and scrutiny?
• Which choice could you not live with?
• Think of the wisest person you know. What would he or she do in this situation?
• Which choice would be the most just, fair, or responsible?

After considering all of these questions, one still might find it difficult to decide what to do. If this is the case, then it may be appropriate to consider others ways of making the decision, such as going with a gut feeling or intuition, seeking guidance through prayer or meditation, or even flipping a coin. Endorsing these methods in this context need not imply that ethical decisions are irrational, however. The main point is that human reasoning plays a pivotal role in ethical decision-making but there are limits to its ability to solve all ethical dilemmas in a finite amount of time.

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Most academic institutions in the US require undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate students to have some education in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) . The NIH and NSF have both mandated training in research ethics for students and trainees. Many academic institutions outside of the US have also developed educational curricula in research ethics

Those of you who are taking or have taken courses in research ethics may be wondering why you are required to have education in research ethics. You may believe that you are highly ethical and know the difference between right and wrong. You would never fabricate or falsify data or plagiarize. Indeed, you also may believe that most of your colleagues are highly ethical and that there is no ethics problem in research..

If you feel this way, relax. No one is accusing you of acting unethically. Indeed, the evidence produced so far shows that misconduct is a very rare occurrence in research, although there is considerable variation among various estimates. The rate of misconduct has been estimated to be as low as 0.01% of researchers per year (based on confirmed cases of misconduct in federally funded research) to as high as 1% of researchers per year (based on self-reports of misconduct on anonymous surveys). See Shamoo and Resnik (2015), cited above.

Clearly, it would be useful to have more data on this topic, but so far there is no evidence that science has become ethically corrupt, despite some highly publicized scandals. Even if misconduct is only a rare occurrence, it can still have a tremendous impact on science and society because it can compromise the integrity of research, erode the public’s trust in science, and waste time and resources. Will education in research ethics help reduce the rate of misconduct in science? It is too early to tell. The answer to this question depends, in part, on how one understands the causes of misconduct. There are two main theories about why researchers commit misconduct. According to the "bad apple" theory, most scientists are highly ethical. Only researchers who are morally corrupt, economically desperate, or psychologically disturbed commit misconduct. Moreover, only a fool would commit misconduct because science's peer review system and self-correcting mechanisms will eventually catch those who try to cheat the system. In any case, a course in research ethics will have little impact on "bad apples," one might argue.

According to the "stressful" or "imperfect" environment theory, misconduct occurs because various institutional pressures, incentives, and constraints encourage people to commit misconduct, such as pressures to publish or obtain grants or contracts, career ambitions, the pursuit of profit or fame, poor supervision of students and trainees, and poor oversight of researchers (see Shamoo and Resnik 2015). Moreover, defenders of the stressful environment theory point out that science's peer review system is far from perfect and that it is relatively easy to cheat the system. Erroneous or fraudulent research often enters the public record without being detected for years. Misconduct probably results from environmental and individual causes, i.e. when people who are morally weak, ignorant, or insensitive are placed in stressful or imperfect environments. In any case, a course in research ethics can be useful in helping to prevent deviations from norms even if it does not prevent misconduct. Education in research ethics is can help people get a better understanding of ethical standards, policies, and issues and improve ethical judgment and decision making. Many of the deviations that occur in research may occur because researchers simply do not know or have never thought seriously about some of the ethical norms of research. For example, some unethical authorship practices probably reflect traditions and practices that have not been questioned seriously until recently. If the director of a lab is named as an author on every paper that comes from his lab, even if he does not make a significant contribution, what could be wrong with that? That's just the way it's done, one might argue. Another example where there may be some ignorance or mistaken traditions is conflicts of interest in research. A researcher may think that a "normal" or "traditional" financial relationship, such as accepting stock or a consulting fee from a drug company that sponsors her research, raises no serious ethical issues. Or perhaps a university administrator sees no ethical problem in taking a large gift with strings attached from a pharmaceutical company. Maybe a physician thinks that it is perfectly appropriate to receive a $300 finder’s fee for referring patients into a clinical trial.

If "deviations" from ethical conduct occur in research as a result of ignorance or a failure to reflect critically on problematic traditions, then a course in research ethics may help reduce the rate of serious deviations by improving the researcher's understanding of ethics and by sensitizing him or her to the issues.

Finally, education in research ethics should be able to help researchers grapple with the ethical dilemmas they are likely to encounter by introducing them to important concepts, tools, principles, and methods that can be useful in resolving these dilemmas. Scientists must deal with a number of different controversial topics, such as human embryonic stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, and research involving animal or human subjects, which require ethical reflection and deliberation.

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Goals and pathways of public governance contribution to achieve progress in the quality of life.

1. Introduction

2. literature review.

• Web of Science—Clarivate (Analytic database): - The subject of the research: “Public Governance” and “Well-being”; - Period: 2010–2024; - Documents type: “Article“;
• VOSviewer Instruments: - Recorded content for VOSviewer: Full text and cited references.
• The analysis was based on: - keywords; - citations/countries; - citations/authors.

3. Methodology and Data

3.1. method and methodology.

• Data mapping of Key Dimensions Using Microsoft Excel 16.88;

4. Results and Discussions

4.1. analytical approach involving data mapping, 4.2. analysis of autoregressive distributed lag (ardl) models using eviews 12 software, 5. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Lobonț, O.-R.; Criste, C.; Bovary, C.; Moț, A.-D.; Vătavu, S. Goals and Pathways of Public Governance Contribution to Achieve Progress in the Quality of Life. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 7860. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177860

Lobonț O-R, Criste C, Bovary C, Moț A-D, Vătavu S. Goals and Pathways of Public Governance Contribution to Achieve Progress in the Quality of Life. Sustainability . 2024; 16(17):7860. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177860

Lobonț, Oana-Ramona, Cristina Criste, Ciel Bovary, Ariana-Denisa Moț, and Sorana Vătavu. 2024. "Goals and Pathways of Public Governance Contribution to Achieve Progress in the Quality of Life" Sustainability 16, no. 17: 7860. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177860

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Professor David R. Williams

Professor David R. Williams Department of Chemistry Indiana University Abstract

Inspiration and Discovery in Natural Product Synthesis

The presentation will discuss the generation of ideas, and aspects of strategy that led to experimentation and execution of a route for the total synthesis of cyathin D and related terpenes. Our retrosynthetic analysis is intended to provide a platform for discoveries of new methods. A fusion of ideas and novel applications stemming from the traditions of natural product synthesis will incorporate leading elements of transition-metal catalysis. Stereocontrolled and regiocontrolled transformations require careful attention to detail and a concept for mechanistic understanding of complex reactions.

David R. Williams

David R. Williams received his B.S. degree (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa Honors) at St. Lawrence University (Canton, New York). He went on to graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded the Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1976 under the direction of Professor George Büchi. Subsequently, he was awarded the National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Harvard University with Professor E. J. Corey (Nobel laureate), and also served as an NIH Fellow at Harvard under the mentorship of Professor R. B. Woodward (Nobel laureate). Prof. Williams began his academic career at IU in 1980. His research has resulted in over 160 scholarly publications. To date, 130 graduate students and postdoctoral associates have studied in his laboratories. Prof. Williams’ research interests lie in the development of methodologies and strategies for the total synthesis of biologically active natural products. The Williams’ laboratories have made leading contributions of synthetic chemistry in areas of marine natural products, including macrocycles, antibiotics, and alkaloids. To date, these efforts have described new pathways to approximately 50 natural product syntheses of importance completed as potential therapeutic agents to advance treatments for cancer, as well as other diseases. 

Prof. Williams was named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2024. In addition, he was the recipient of the ACS Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products (2018) and was recognized with the ACS Edward Leete Award (2005) for mentorship and scholarship in his research.

Hosted by Professor Chris Douglas

331 Smith Hall Zoom Link

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Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024

Confidence in U.S. public opinion polling was shaken by errors in 2016 and 2020. In both years’ general elections, many polls underestimated the strength of Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. These errors laid bare some real limitations of polling.

In the midterms that followed those elections, polling performed better . But many Americans remain skeptical that it can paint an accurate portrait of the public’s political preferences.

Restoring people’s confidence in polling is an important goal, because robust and independent public polling has a critical role to play in a democratic society. It gathers and publishes information about the well-being of the public and about citizens’ views on major issues. And it provides an important counterweight to people in power, or those seeking power, when they make claims about “what the people want.”

The challenges facing polling are undeniable. In addition to the longstanding issues of rising nonresponse and cost, summer 2024 brought extraordinary events that transformed the presidential race . The good news is that people with deep knowledge of polling are working hard to fix the problems exposed in 2016 and 2020, experimenting with more data sources and interview approaches than ever before. Still, polls are more useful to the public if people have realistic expectations about what surveys can do well – and what they cannot.

With that in mind, here are some key points to know about polling heading into this year’s presidential election.

Probability sampling (or “random sampling”). This refers to a polling method in which survey participants are recruited using random sampling from a database or list that includes nearly everyone in the population. The pollster selects the sample. The survey is not open for anyone who wants to sign up.

Online opt-in polling (or “nonprobability sampling”). These polls are recruited using a variety of methods that are sometimes referred to as “convenience sampling.” Respondents come from a variety of online sources such as ads on social media or search engines, websites offering rewards in exchange for survey participation, or self-enrollment. Unlike surveys with probability samples, people can volunteer to participate in opt-in surveys.

Nonresponse and nonresponse bias. Nonresponse is when someone sampled for a survey does not participate. Nonresponse bias occurs when the pattern of nonresponse leads to error in a poll estimate. For example, college graduates are more likely than those without a degree to participate in surveys, leading to the potential that the share of college graduates in the resulting sample will be too high.

Mode of interview. This refers to the format in which respondents are presented with and respond to survey questions. The most common modes are online, live telephone, text message and paper. Some polls use more than one mode.

Weighting. This is a statistical procedure pollsters perform to make their survey align with the broader population on key characteristics like age, race, etc. For example, if a survey has too many college graduates compared with their share in the population, people without a college degree are “weighted up” to match the proper share.

How are election polls being conducted?

Pollsters are making changes in response to the problems in previous elections. As a result, polling is different today than in 2016. Most U.S. polling organizations that conducted and publicly released national surveys in both 2016 and 2022 (61%) used methods in 2022 that differed from what they used in 2016 . And change has continued since 2022.

One change is that the number of active polling organizations has grown significantly, indicating that there are fewer barriers to entry into the polling field. The number of organizations that conduct national election polls more than doubled between 2000 and 2022.

This growth has been driven largely by pollsters using inexpensive opt-in sampling methods. But previous Pew Research Center analyses have demonstrated how surveys that use nonprobability sampling may have errors twice as large , on average, as those that use probability sampling.

The second change is that many of the more prominent polling organizations that use probability sampling – including Pew Research Center – have shifted from conducting polls primarily by telephone to using online methods, or some combination of online, mail and telephone. The result is that polling methodologies are far more diverse now than in the past.

(For more about how public opinion polling works, including a chapter on election polls, read our short online course on public opinion polling basics .)

All good polling relies on statistical adjustment called “weighting,” which makes sure that the survey sample aligns with the broader population on key characteristics. Historically, public opinion researchers have adjusted their data using a core set of demographic variables to correct imbalances between the survey sample and the population.

But there is a growing realization among survey researchers that weighting a poll on just a few variables like age, race and gender is insufficient for getting accurate results. Some groups of people – such as older adults and college graduates – are more likely to take surveys, which can lead to errors that are too sizable for a simple three- or four-variable adjustment to work well. Adjusting on more variables produces more accurate results, according to Center studies in 2016 and 2018 .

A number of pollsters have taken this lesson to heart. For example, recent high-quality polls by Gallup and The New York Times/Siena College adjusted on eight and 12 variables, respectively. Our own polls typically adjust on 12 variables . In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be necessary to have that much intervention by the pollster. But the real world of survey research is not perfect.

Predicting who will vote is critical – and difficult. Preelection polls face one crucial challenge that routine opinion polls do not: determining who of the people surveyed will actually cast a ballot.

Roughly a third of eligible Americans do not vote in presidential elections , despite the enormous attention paid to these contests. Determining who will abstain is difficult because people can’t perfectly predict their future behavior – and because many people feel social pressure to say they’ll vote even if it’s unlikely.

No one knows the profile of voters ahead of Election Day. We can’t know for sure whether young people will turn out in greater numbers than usual, or whether key racial or ethnic groups will do so. This means pollsters are left to make educated guesses about turnout, often using a mix of historical data and current measures of voting enthusiasm. This is very different from routine opinion polls, which mostly do not ask about people’s future intentions.

When major news breaks, a poll’s timing can matter. Public opinion on most issues is remarkably stable, so you don’t necessarily need a recent poll about an issue to get a sense of what people think about it. But dramatic events can and do change public opinion , especially when people are first learning about a new topic. For example, polls this summer saw notable changes in voter attitudes following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. Polls taken immediately after a major event may pick up a shift in public opinion, but those shifts are sometimes short-lived. Polls fielded weeks or months later are what allow us to see whether an event has had a long-term impact on the public’s psyche.

How accurate are polls?

The answer to this question depends on what you want polls to do. Polls are used for all kinds of purposes in addition to showing who’s ahead and who’s behind in a campaign. Fair or not, however, the accuracy of election polling is usually judged by how closely the polls matched the outcome of the election.

By this standard, polling in 2016 and 2020 performed poorly. In both years, state polling was characterized by serious errors. National polling did reasonably well in 2016 but faltered in 2020.

In 2020, a post-election review of polling by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) found that “the 2020 polls featured polling error of an unusual magnitude: It was the highest in 40 years for the national popular vote and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level estimates of the vote in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial contests.”

How big were the errors? Polls conducted in the last two weeks before the election suggested that Biden’s margin over Trump was nearly twice as large as it ended up being in the final national vote tally.

Errors of this size make it difficult to be confident about who is leading if the election is closely contested, as many U.S. elections are .

Pollsters are rightly working to improve the accuracy of their polls. But even an error of 4 or 5 percentage points isn’t too concerning if the purpose of the poll is to describe whether the public has favorable or unfavorable opinions about candidates , or to show which issues matter to which voters. And on questions that gauge where people stand on issues, we usually want to know broadly where the public stands. We don’t necessarily need to know the precise share of Americans who say, for example, that climate change is mostly caused by human activity. Even judged by its performance in recent elections, polling can still provide a faithful picture of public sentiment on the important issues of the day.

The 2022 midterms saw generally accurate polling, despite a wave of partisan polls predicting a broad Republican victory. In fact, FiveThirtyEight found that “polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.” Moreover, a handful of contrarian polls that predicted a 2022 “red wave” largely washed out when the votes were tallied. In sum, if we focus on polling in the most recent national election, there’s plenty of reason to be encouraged.

Compared with other elections in the past 20 years, polls have been less accurate when Donald Trump is on the ballot. Preelection surveys suffered from large errors – especially at the state level – in 2016 and 2020, when Trump was standing for election. But they performed reasonably well in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, when he was not.

During the 2016 campaign, observers speculated about the possibility that Trump supporters might be less willing to express their support to a pollster – a phenomenon sometimes described as the “shy Trump effect.” But a committee of polling experts evaluated five different tests of the “shy Trump” theory and turned up little to no evidence for each one . Later, Pew Research Center and, in a separate test, a researcher from Yale also found little to no evidence in support of the claim.

Instead, two other explanations are more likely. One is about the difficulty of estimating who will turn out to vote. Research has found that Trump is popular among people who tend to sit out midterms but turn out for him in presidential election years. Since pollsters often use past turnout to predict who will vote, it can be difficult to anticipate when irregular voters will actually show up.

The other explanation is that Republicans in the Trump era have become a little less likely than Democrats to participate in polls . Pollsters call this “partisan nonresponse bias.” Surprisingly, polls historically have not shown any particular pattern of favoring one side or the other. The errors that favored Democratic candidates in the past eight years may be a result of the growth of political polarization, along with declining trust among conservatives in news organizations and other institutions that conduct polls.

Whatever the cause, the fact that Trump is again the nominee of the Republican Party means that pollsters must be especially careful to make sure all segments of the population are properly represented in surveys.

The real margin of error is often about double the one reported. A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points. That number expresses the uncertainty that results from taking a sample of the population rather than interviewing everyone . Random samples are likely to differ a little from the population just by chance, in the same way that the quality of your hand in a card game varies from one deal to the next.

The problem is that sampling error is not the only kind of error that affects a poll. Those other kinds of error, in fact, can be as large or larger than sampling error. Consequently, the reported margin of error can lead people to think that polls are more accurate than they really are.

There are three other, equally important sources of error in polling: noncoverage error , where not all the target population has a chance of being sampled; nonresponse error, where certain groups of people may be less likely to participate; and measurement error, where people may not properly understand the questions or misreport their opinions. Not only does the margin of error fail to account for those other sources of potential error, putting a number only on sampling error implies to the public that other kinds of error do not exist.

Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.

Other important things to remember

Transparency in how a poll was conducted is associated with better accuracy . The polling industry has several platforms and initiatives aimed at promoting transparency in survey methodology. These include AAPOR’s transparency initiative and the Roper Center archive . Polling organizations that participate in these organizations have less error, on average, than those that don’t participate, an analysis by FiveThirtyEight found .

Participation in these transparency efforts does not guarantee that a poll is rigorous, but it is undoubtedly a positive signal. Transparency in polling means disclosing essential information, including the poll’s sponsor, the data collection firm, where and how participants were selected, modes of interview, field dates, sample size, question wording, and weighting procedures.

There is evidence that when the public is told that a candidate is extremely likely to win, some people may be less likely to vote . Following the 2016 election, many people wondered whether the pervasive forecasts that seemed to all but guarantee a Hillary Clinton victory – two modelers put her chances at 99% – led some would-be voters to conclude that the race was effectively over and that their vote would not make a difference. There is scientific research to back up that claim: A team of researchers found experimental evidence that when people have high confidence that one candidate will win, they are less likely to vote. This helps explain why some polling analysts say elections should be covered using traditional polling estimates and margins of error rather than speculative win probabilities (also known as “probabilistic forecasts”).

National polls tell us what the entire public thinks about the presidential candidates, but the outcome of the election is determined state by state in the Electoral College . The 2000 and 2016 presidential elections demonstrated a difficult truth: The candidate with the largest share of support among all voters in the United States sometimes loses the election. In those two elections, the national popular vote winners (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) lost the election in the Electoral College (to George W. Bush and Donald Trump). In recent years, analysts have shown that Republican candidates do somewhat better in the Electoral College than in the popular vote because every state gets three electoral votes regardless of population – and many less-populated states are rural and more Republican.

For some, this raises the question: What is the use of national polls if they don’t tell us who is likely to win the presidency? In fact, national polls try to gauge the opinions of all Americans, regardless of whether they live in a battleground state like Pennsylvania, a reliably red state like Idaho or a reliably blue state like Rhode Island. In short, national polls tell us what the entire citizenry is thinking. Polls that focus only on the competitive states run the risk of giving too little attention to the needs and views of the vast majority of Americans who live in uncompetitive states – about 80%.

Fortunately, this is not how most pollsters view the world . As the noted political scientist Sidney Verba explained, “Surveys produce just what democracy is supposed to produce – equal representation of all citizens.”

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Scott Keeter is a senior survey advisor at Pew Research Center .

Courtney Kennedy is Vice President of Methods and Innovation at Pew Research Center .

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