Arts and humanities research makes a major contribution to the economic prosperity and social fabric of the UK. Many of the fastest growing parts of the UK economy sit within the AHRC's subject domains including new media, computer games, music, textiles and fashion, design, film and television.
As a publicly funded body, and to help us develop policy, it is important that we evaluate the impact of the research we fund, the extent to which AHRC funding opportunites are delivering their aims and objectives and the contribution that our funding makes to the quality and health of the arts and humanities research base. We do this in a number of ways:
Evaluating our research and schemes
The arts and humanities create social and economic benefits directly and indirectly through improvements in social and intellectual capital, social networking, community identity, learning and skills and quality of life. We evaluate impact of the research we fund through in-depth case studies of projects.
The scheme evaluations are intended to assess whether schemes are fulfilling their aims, to highlight any problems associated with their scope and implementation and to assess wider impacts and benefits. As well as analysising monitoring and assessments reports, reviews have included email surveys and telephone and face-to-face interviews.
Economic Impact Reporting Framework
The Economic Impact Reporting Framework (457kb) contains data on selected aspects of AHRC performance relevant to the Government's objectives for the UK science base.
Understanding the arts and humanities research base
In order for us to understand the impact that the research we fund has, we need to understand the context in which we operate. These studies, undertaken in 2008-09 provide an insight to how subject areas such as forensic linguistics, have developed.
Working with Europe
We are working with the European Science Foundation on the European Reference Index for the Humanities.
Work package four of the HERA EU 6th Framework Programme ERA-NET focuses on quality and impact assessment. By exchanging information and best practice on issues such as nation and international peer review, programme management, quality and impact assessment, and benchmarking HERA aims to ensure the highest excellence in nationally funded research as well as research conducted within the framework of HERA activities.
Further information
More information about our evaluation activites can be found in our strategy and framework.
Evaluation Strategy (58kb)
Council's Evaluation Framework (24kb)