SUMMARY

Sustainability assessments are used for supporting decision-making and policy support to improve the technical evaluation with regards to the three sustainability pillars: environmental, economic and social pillars respectively. The goal of this work is to develop a framework that is used to perform social sustainability assessment of products and services based on existing methods found in the literature. This will be achieved by answering the following research questions: 1) What are the current methods and frameworks available to perform social impact assessments of products? 2) What are the challenges and limitations faced by such methods? 3) How can the user be guided through the social impact assessment process to succeed among these challenges? The main goal of the framework is to serve as a guide to performing social impact assessments of products and services in a general context.
This proposed research has been divided into three parts. Part I is to perform a systematic literature review (SLR) (Biolchini et al. 2005) and meta-analysis of the field of Social Impact Assessment Methods. There are two aims for completing Part I of the thesis. The first aim is to understand the state of the art in the social impact assessment field with respect to the methods used currently in the field. The second aim is to summarize the main challenges of performing social impact assessments. Part II consists of developing a framework with the aim of supporting the user when performing a social impact assessment. Part III of the thesis consists of evaluating and refining the framework through two different approaches. The first approach is to apply the framework to a set of case studies for theoretical testing. The second approach to evaluation will be to perform a student simulation in which the framework is provided to Mechanical Engineering students completing their capstone design project course.