WWW.CSI.UNI-HD.DE'Social Return on Investment' (SROI) is the tool for social impact measurement that has received most attention in recent years and turned to be the one most widely applied by practitioners in civil society and social investment (understood as private contributions to the public good).Beyond that SROI studies are increasingly used to inform policy making.Politicians, especially in the UK, draw on the approach to assess what social projects are able to achieve by building on measurable social impact produced.Despite this development, the field of SROI suffers from strong intransparency.How many SROI studies have been realized to date, on what kind of activity, where and by whom have they been executed?What kind of specific study designs, impact indicators and financial proxies have been used?This intransparency goes in hand with a severe lack of academic research on the subject (Arvidson et al. 2010: 3f.).Social impact assessment methodology is a research field in an evolutionary stage.Arguably, SROI is just about to become "[…] a field of research and practice, a body of scholars and practitioners, a discourse and a community of practice […]" (Vanclay & Esteves 2011: 5f.) -a development we have witnessed quite similarly in the closely related field of environmental impact assessment to which the quote relates.This meta study is meant to contribute to this development.Our analysis of published SROI studies between 2000 and early 2012 focuses on three areas of SROI: 1. Initiators, analysts & analyzed organizations 2. Fields of application, target groups & indicators applied 3. Quality assessment.We explore these three areas in order to shed light on two central questions.(I) Where did SROI emerge, which new fields has it spread to later on, and which transformations of the approach have taken place throughout increased practical application?(II) In how far have SROI studies succeeded in capturing the social impact of given activities or organizations in a sufficiently accurate and holistic way?What are the critical issues on the agenda for the future development of SROI?
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Krlev et al. (2015) studied this question.