Evaluation of a challenge-derived social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) framework

Sustainability assessments provide methodologies to assess the environmental, economic, and social impacts of products along their life cycle. The purpose of this research is to develop a social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) framework derived from a set of challenges identified in the S-LCA field. The S-LCA framework presented in this study is developed by i) performing a systematic mapping of the S-LCA field; ii) gathering of LCA and SIA expert feedback; iii) evaluation through a novice user study; iv) and a case study application. The systematic mapping procedure is explained in detail (Bonilla-Alicea and Fu 2019), while the expert feedback and novice user study are the focus of this article. The case study application of the framework is the subject of a separate publication. The expert feedback is used to verify the relevance of the challenges through electronic survey data. Based on the expert feedback, the number of challenges is reduced from twelve to ten, as two of the challenges are considered part of the study design rather than challenges to performing social assessments. The novice user study implemented a simplified version of the S-LCA framework, and users were able to identify potential social impacts of their capstone design.