Humanities and social science research takes aim at South Korea's demographic crisis

The National Research Foundation of Korea announced Thursday that it has selected eight winning entries in its "2026 Humanities and Social Sciences Research Impact Competition," which recognizes studies with tangible public benefits.

The competition was designed to highlight empirical, data-driven solutions from the humanities and social sciences community to complex national challenges facing South Korea — including the demographic crisis, social conflict and regional depopulation.

Rather than relying on conventional quantitative measures such as paper and book output, the evaluation focused on how meaningfully humanities and social science research had contributed to government policy development, institutional reform and shifts in public awareness.

Judges assessed entries on criteria including "contribution to social discourse and practical impact" and "capacity to address pressing issues," selecting eight teams in total — one grand prize winner and three excellence award winners in each of the humanities and social sciences categories.

The humanities grand prize went to the Humanities Counseling Center at Kyungpook National University's Institute of Humanities for its project developing life-history programs for older adults, including an AI-powered version. The research team showed how AI trained on professional counseling data could help address depression and loss of purpose among the elderly — a persistent challenge in South Korea's rapidly aging society — demonstrating the potential for humanities research to deliver direct social returns.

The social sciences grand prize went to the Global Regional Culture Research Institute at Daejeon University for its study on activating a Korean-style "fourth sector" model to counter regional depopulation. The team developed a "regional depopulation crisis response recovery index," integrated it into a three-dimensional spatial information platform and connected it to policy advisory work with local governments including Gongju and Seosan.

Six additional research institutes received excellence awards for work that brought measurable change to the lives of marginalized groups and narrowed the gap between academic research and policy practice — covering areas such as linguistic innovation in sign language, addressing care gaps for people with developmental disabilities, and building integrated data systems for brain disease research.

A National Research Foundation official said the foundation plans to use the recognized achievements to build broad national consensus on the value of investing in humanities and social sciences research and development, and to leverage the results as a catalyst for strategic qualitative change.