Achieving research impact in tourism: Modelling and evaluating outcomes from the UKs Research Excellence Framework

Abstract

The marketisation of higher education has emerged as a global trend with a focus on using metrics to assess performance. This has led to the closer scrutiny by government in assessing value for money and effectiveness of research outcomes in national allocations of research funding. This paper focuses on one controversial strand of assessing research outcomes - the area of research impact. The paper examines the experiences of the UKs Research Assessment Exercise in 2014 and the tourism impact case studies developed as part of institutional submissions on research impact. The paper examines the case studies using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which is a set-theoretic method, to identify what a high quality impact case study looks like from a range of criteria. The paper derives a wider range of implications for tourism scholars that has wider application across other areas in which Tourism is located.