Mobilisation for public engagement: Benchmarking the practices of research institutes.

Marta Entradas,Martin M. Bauer

doi:10.1177/0963662516633834

Abstract

Studies on scientists' practices of public engagement have pointed to variations between disciplines. If variations at the individual level are reflected at the institutional level, then research institutes in Social Sciences (and Humanities) should perform higher in public engagement and be more involved in dialogue with the public. Using a nearly complete sample of research institutes in Portugal 2014 ( n = 234, 61% response rate), we investigate how public engagement varies in intensity, type of activities and target audiences across scientific areas. Three benchmark findings emerge. First, the Social Sciences and the Humanities profile differently in public engagement highlighting the importance of distinguishing between these two scientific areas often conflated in public engagement studies. Second, the Social Sciences overall perform more public engagement activities, but the Natural Sciences mobilise more effort for public engagement. Third, while the Social Sciences play a greater role in civic public engagement, the Natural Sciences are more likely to perform educational activities. Finally, this study shows that the overall size of research institutes, available public engagement funding and public engagement staffing make a difference in institutes' public engagement.

Highlights

There is a widely entertained, societal obligation on the part of scientific institutions to serve society with social impact and to engage citizens in research policy (Ziman, 1984, 173ff.)
In this system of indicators, we examine the following model: how does scientific area affect the Public Engagement (PE) activity of Research Institutes (RIs) controlling for the overall size of the RI, the funding available for PE (PE funding), and the staff dedicated to PE activities (PE staffing) (Figure 1)
The principal result of our investigation is that we can confirm differences in the intensity of PE activities across scientific areas both in terms of overall performance and mobilisation of PE: RIs in the Social Sciences and Humanities perform more PE activities overall, but RIs in the Natural Sciences are more likely to mobilise high performers for PE events. This means that RIs in the Social Sciences and Humanities put on more events, their efforts are more distributed, while the Natural Sciences, despite performing fewer events, count the top performers amongst their crowd

Summary

Introduction

There is a widely entertained, societal obligation on the part of scientific institutions to serve society with social impact and to engage citizens in research policy (Ziman, 1984, 173ff.). We examine institutional PE in six scientific areas following OECD practice – (1) Natural Sciences, (2) Engineering and Technology, (3) Medical and Health Sciences, (4) Agricultural Sciences, (5) Social Sciences, (6) and Humanities, according to what we call performance, i.e. the amount of activities carried out by RIs, and mobilisation, i.e. the likelihood of RIs performing a higher than median level of PE activities, i.e. a measure of eccentricity. Against this backdrop, we tested the following hypotheses on the variations of PE across RIs: H1 (intensity): The intensity of PE activities varies across scientific areas.

Data and data analysis

Results 9

Findings

Discussion