Competencies and Activities for Generating Practical Impact in Applied Social Sciences Research Projects: The Perceptions of Researchers at Fundação Getúlio Vargas
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2025-11-18
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Abrucio, Fernando Luiz
Wood Junior, Thomaz
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Increasing societal demands for accountability in research have placed greater pressure on the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to demonstrate tangible impacts beyond academia. This study addresses that challenge by investigating which competencies and activities applied social science researchers should adopt to maximize the practical outcomes of their work for organizations, public policy, and society. We conducted a qualitative, exploratory multiple case study that included semi-structured interviews with 35 researchers from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), each involved in one of 13 high-impact awarded applied research projects. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we inductively identified key categories and themes from the data. Our findings reveal fifteen critical factors: eight essential researcher competencies and seven pivotal activities. The competencies identified include effective communication across diverse audiences, critical thinking, ethics and reflexivity, relationship-building, knowledge co-production, political literacy coupled with narrative skill, practical management abilities, and methodological flexibility. The key activities comprise active communication and dissemination, advocacy, translating knowledge for broader audiences, participation, engagement and mobilization, reflexivity and methodological development, territorial and relational engagement, and building trust through long-term support and relationships. Together, these competencies and activities form a practice-oriented framework that researchers can integrate into their daily work to generate societal impact. This framework translates broad, abstract expectations of impact into a set of concrete actions, while acknowledging limitations related to context, scope, and conceptual boundaries. Adopting these strategies can help SSH researchers enhance the practical impact of their work, and we encourage future research to test and refine this framework across diverse institutional and cultural settings.