Abstract
AbstractSuccessful management of sociotechnical issues like those raised by the COVID-19 pandemic requires members of the public to use scientific research in their reasoning. In this study, we explore the nature and extent of the public’s abilities to assess research publications through analyzing a corpus of close to 5 K tweets from the early months of the pandemic which mentioned one of six key studies on the then-uncertain topic of the efficacy of face masks. We find that arguers relied on a variety of critical questions to test the adequacy of the research publications to serve as premises in reasoning, their relevance to the issues at hand, and their sufficiency in justifying conclusions. In particular, arguers showed more skill in assessing the authoritativeness of the sources of the publications than in assessing the epistemic qualities of the studies being reported. These results indicate specific areas for interventions to improve reasoning about research publications. Moreover, this study suggests the potential of studying argumentation at the system level in order to document collective preparedness to address sociotechnical issues, i.e., community science literacy.
Highlights
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020 forced all of us to form quick yet consequential views on complex sociotechnical issues
Adequacy: Is the research publication associated with an entity with an established reputation for scientific legitimacy?
We found a strong level of competence in assessing the relevance of research publications to information needs, and the quantitative sufficiency of RPs
Summary
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020 forced all of us to form quick yet consequential views on complex sociotechnical issues. There were only a handful of studies relevant to use of cloth face masks in community settings, and those provided only tentative and ambiguous answers.2 While this was bad news for those trying to figure out what to do, it is good news for argumentation theorists: the deep uncertainties around the topic of masking can be presumed to drive increased care and effort by the arguers who were trying to draw what they could from the sparse scientific literature. In order to explore the argumentative use of research publications (RPs) in the mask debate, we turned to a segment of a previously-collected corpus of RP-related discourse from early in the pandemic (Bogomoletc et al, 2021). The resulting corpus consisted of 4775 tweets (including duplicates when a tweet linked to more than one of the target RPs)
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