Impact can mean many things to many people. For me it is about engaging with non-academics throughout the research process. A useful starting point is the influential 2004 Presidential Address: For Public Sociology by Michael Burawoy, which sets up a framework to think through about the kinds of knowledge we generate and its respective publics. non-academics are outlined: Policy and public. While policy audiences are interested in solutions to america rcs data problems, public social science wants to engage its publics by starting up a conversation about what the problem actually is. This can happen in a more traditional way, through mediatised discussion in the public sphere, or organically by working closely together with the group under study, turning participants into subjects instead of objects. Importantly professional, critical, policy and public approaches to social science are mixed up in reality, and all forms of knowledge rest on a solid foundation of professional, methodological research.
In terms of my personal research, I can see how these different types of engagement happen in different phases of a project. When a research paper is published, I try to translate results to a non-academic audience, using traditional (e.g. The Telegraph article) as well as social media (e.g. Manchester Policy Blog), to create some public debate about the issue at hand. Sometimes ideas in these papers are picked up in more policy oriented circles, like expert reviews (e.g. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) evidence review), policy work, or indirectly influencing the topics on which official statistics are collected (e.g. ONS’s personal wellbeing estimates).