The Cognitive Dimension of Public Perceptions of Science: Methodological Issues

Abstract

The cognitive dimension of public perceptions of science is a central component of the interdisciplinary field devoted to their study. The subset of this dimension that has received the most attention is the one known as scientific literacy (SL), and particularly scientific knowledge of the “know-what” type. People’s appropriation of scientific theories of the world and also of the inner workings of scientific practice is of interest in itself and also for its role in explaining—in interaction with other variables—public attitudes toward science. Despite its significance, the understanding of science has received progressively less attention since the late 1990s. This paper reviews the substantive characteristics and formal properties of the scale of SL most widely used in the literature, which has been constructed on the basis of Eurobarometer measurements. It considers a number of steps, such as content, item analysis, and differential reliability, both for the total sample and for different nations and social groups, that are usually omitted in the literature. This new analysis shows that the standard SL test barely achieves satisfactory metric properties and that although it captures major (but not fine-grained) differences in SL by nation and sociodemographic groups, it is in need of significant theoretical and formal improvements. Our analysis also shows that a well-known thesis in the literature, the so-called “knowledge-ignorance paradox,” rests on a statistical misinterpretation of the data.