What is the context for your research project? You could consider:

• What is the problem you’re responding to? What is the current political, socio-economic and technological context in which you would be doing research to address that problem? 
• What work is already being done? What has already been attempted?
• Who are the stakeholders who might respond to or otherwise be affected by your research? How open might they be to working with you, or responding to your research?
  
  

Your knowledge of the context in which you will be doing research will help you find a useful research question, for example one that is novel, addresses an important aspect of the problem you have identified, and could plausibly affect the decisions of stakeholders.

Ideally your research will lead to more than one impact; for example, your primary goal might be changing the actions of some specific decision-makers, but you might have secondary goals of building your own skills and credibility. As you move forward with your research, you might also adjust your theory of change as you discover other plausible routes for additional impact. 

Below are four key types of impact you could aim to have and the outputs that could help you reach them.

Research (most often applied research) can directly shape interventions, policies or other actions, for example by informing the actions of advocacy organisations, decision-makers in government, entrepreneurs, individuals trying to decide what they should work on to improve the world, or funding bodies.

Your research might have the best chance of influencing decision-makers if you begin collaborating or connecting with them early in the research process to build trust and learn how to optimise your research and the presentation of your findings for their needs. If you don’t interact with the stakeholders you’re hoping to inform directly, try to learn from others who have influenced the stakeholder group.

See our post on working with stakeholders for more advice on these topics.

You might be aiming to contribute new knowledge to your research field that other researchers (or you) will build on in future.

Particularly if you’re doing highly explorative or basic research with this goal in mind, the concrete impacts of your research will be hard to predict. However, we think it’s still productive to build a theory of change as there will likely be some impacts you want to aim for; for example you might want to plan how to produce exceptional research or disseminate your findings widely in the academic or broader research community.

See our post on sharing your finished thesis for some ideas about how to disseminate your research.

You could use your research project to learn more about whether you’re good at [a particular type of] research, and whether you want to work on a given topic long-term. You’ll likely want to prioritise getting feedback on the quality of your work, as well as reflecting on your experience of doing research.

See our post on testing your fit for a research career for ideas about how you could use a research project to learn more about your own aptitudes.

If you want to use your research project to build your expertise, you might want to prioritise working with an excellent supervisor and choosing a research question that will build valuable skills for later in your career. If you want to build impressive credentials, consider which awards you could submit your research to, what will enable you to get high marks and where to publish your research.

By collaborating with researchers or an organisation, you could also develop connections that could be useful later in your career. You could also focus on sharing your research at conferences and on social media if you want to use it to build a network.

Your research could also help to build your research field by shaping its trajectory, helping to increase its credibility and drawing other researchers to the field. 

Presentations and conversations stemming from your research could inspire others to take action, contribute to raising the profile of a certain area and encourage other researchers to get involved. Media coverage of your research could increase the salience of an important problem among the public or policy-makers.

The output of your project is the research you produce and the ways you communicate your findings. Based on the impacts you hope to have you may want to share your research findings in many different forms. For example, you might want to:

• Publish your results in specific journals
• Share your results with specific organisations or researchers, and potentially create outputs in collaboration with them
• Share results with the media
• Hold workshops to promote your research findings to key stakeholders
• Share key findings with policy-makers in the form of policy-briefs
  
  

You might however choose not to share your research, for example if your aim is to build your own skills or knowledge.

One thing you could experiment with is which step of your theory of change you begin with.

Forward-chaining means starting with your research project and mapping out how it could be useful for achieving valuable goals.

Back-chaining means starting with an impact you want to achieve and then working backwards to figure out what research could produce this impact.

In reality you probably won’t build your theory of change in a totally linear way. But having these concepts in mind might help you decide which direction to tend to think in.

When might back-chaining be more useful?

Back-chaining can be useful because it makes it more likely you’ll notice the best way of achieving a certain outcome, and you’ll be less likely to engage in wishful thinking about what a specific research question could achieve. 

Allan Dafoe describes the ‘product model of research’ as a perspective that ‘regards the value of funding research to be primarily in answering specific important questions.’ It makes most sense to think about your research this way when you’re trying to solve a well-defined problem, such as producing a vaccination against a specific disease or developing larger bioreactors. If you’re trying to accomplish relatively concrete and legible goals like these, back-chaining is probably most useful.

When might forward-chaining be more useful?

However if you’re working in a pre-paradigmatic field in which the concrete challenges that may be faced in future are less predictable, it may be harder to narrow in on a specific research question that’s the best one to achieve your goals, and you might want to think in terms of an ‘asset model of research impact.’

This means your research might be more curiosity-driven, and focused on building generalisable expertise and credibility, productive collaborations and networks, and a greater shared sum of knowledge in the short-term, with the goal of building a research community that will be able to respond in a wide range of future scenarios.

It’s valuable to look for the assumptions you’re making at each stage of your theory of change and try to check if the evidence supports them. See if you can be more specific in any areas where your thinking is fuzzy on how you intend to achieve a desired impact or output.

You could ask questions such as:

• what are the underlying beliefs that lead you to expect your research results could have a positive impact on the world? Does pre-existing research support these beliefs?
• do you have the resources you need to complete your project? 
• what is the specific organisation, team or individual who might find your work useful? 
• who exactly will you reach out to and when would be the best time?
• will anyone be challenging to reach? 
• how will you disseminate your research (e.g. can you identify specific journals, conferences, or opportunities to hold workshops)?
  
  

Your theory of change will likely evolve once you begin your research project, but getting specific while building it will help you establish whether there are plausible paths to impact before you invest a lot of time in your project.