Improving research culture: confidence in qualitative assessment approaches.

Karen Stroobants is a policy adviser and consultant on research policy and strategy, with a specific focus on research culture. She combines roles as director of CultureBase Consulting and as a lead policy advisor on research landscape and economy at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
She is a Vice-Chair of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and a Governing Board Member for Euro Science. She was part of the team that drafted the Agreement on reforming research assessment, through an extensive co-creation process with stakeholders in the research landscape in Europe and beyond.
Previously, Karen held roles at RAND Europe, and the Royal Society where she led the development of the narrative Resumé for Researchers that since has been introduced by UK Research and Innovation. Karen moved to the UK initially as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Prior to this, she obtained her PhD in chemistry at KU Leuven in Belgium.
Current momentum for research and academic assessment reform, including through the recently launched Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, holds a lot of potential for improving research culture. Increasing the focus on qualitative assessment methods is a promising direction for this potential to be realised, but will require the research community to have confidence in such methods. There is scope to explore methods beyond peer review, including approaches that already are being embedded in the research sector in some countries, as well as those that are well-established outside academia but largely unexplored within research institutions. Both organisations and individuals can contribute to the development of new assessment methods, as an important route towards contributing to a better research culture.
- Why is research assessment reform a central lever to improving research culture?
- What is the value of qualitative assessment methods in this context?
- What are some of the opportunities for exploring qualitative methods?
- How can barriers to confidence in these methods be addressed?
- How can organisations and individuals contribute to development and implementation of such methods, and hence to improving research culture?