Abstract
European Researchers' Night is an annual pan-European synchronized event devoted to public engagement with research. It was first held in 2005 and now occurs in over 400 cities across Europe, with the aim of bringing researchers closer to the general public. To investigate social inclusion in these events, we conducted survey research across three national contexts (Ireland, Malta and the UK) and events in seven cities between 2016 and 2019 (n = 1590). The results from this exploratory descriptive study confirmed one hypothesis, namely that event attendees had substantially higher levels of university qualification than the national publics. This is in line with wider patterns of unequal participation in public engagement with research activities based on socio-economic status. However, we also found mixed evidence on the prevalence of ethnic minority representation among event attendees compared to the general population, thus failing to uphold the second hypothesis that predicted an over-representation of white majority participants. This second finding diverges from existing research findings about ethnic diversity amongst science communication audiences, raising the possibility that some public engagement events are over-performing on this dimension of social inclusion. Overall, the findings demonstrate that European Researchers' Night has potential for addressing the critical goal of enhancing the diversity of audiences for public engagement with research, even as it falls short on the key metric of socio-economic diversity.
Highlights
Like many governments around the world, the European Union (EU) has been focused for many years on improving engagement between the scientific community and European society
Because the research literature on science festivals is more developed than European Researchers’ Night per se, we focus here on what is already known about science festivals as an approach to engaging public audiences with research
We found that a large proportion of adult attendees to each European Researchers’ Night event were more highly educated than the national populations (See Table 4)
Summary
Like many governments around the world, the European Union (EU) has been focused for many years on improving engagement between the scientific community and European society. A pressing concern is the question of who from within European society has the opportunity to engage with, participate in and benefit from research and innovation (e.g., [1]). In an effort to widen public access and engagement, a pan-European initiative called European. Diversity in public engagement with research accessible at https://zenodo.org/record/4905718#.
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