Public Understanding Of Science Research Articles

Understanding What in Public Understanding of Science

Abstract What should citizens understand about science to participate in democratic life? Against the prevailing approach, we argue that “what” a public understanding of science is about strongly depends on the specific epistemological nature of the science related issues considered in different contexts and circumstances. We identify three specific categories of such issues and show how, equally, specific models of public understanding are required to address them. Only by endorsing such an alternative approach will citizens arguably be able to form sound opinions about those very issues, as well as to discuss and deliberate rationally about them.

Creationism and climate skepticism: power and public understandings of science in America

This FORUM article is written in response to ‘Evolutionary Stasis: creationism, evolution and climate change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum’ by Jenna Scaramanga and Michael J. Reiss published in CSSE in 2023. Starting from a sociological rather than pedagogical standpoint, the article aims to situate Accelerated Christian Education’s curriculum in relation to evolution and climate change in its broader context. This broader context comprises a national situation of Culture Wars where views on science and religion are politically polarized and morally inflected. Creationism and climate change denial/skepticism occur together and connect to right-wing politics. Climate change denial also clearly connects to corporate interests. Struggles for political, economic, ideological, and epistemic power all pertain. Reference is then made to recently collected focus group data to illustrate how non-creationist publics may also define science narrowly and inaccurately and yet still support it. The influence of evolution and climate change denialists must not be overstated. However, the harm of inaccurate, pseudoscientific education also requires examination. Nothing less than the Earth’s future is at stake, and education is a key battlefield. Science educators have an important role to play, working with patience, empathy, and awareness.

Imagining the model citizen: A comparison between public understanding of science, public engagement in science, and citizen science.

This article examines the visions of citizens' ideal practices regarding technoscientific affairs in a democratic society, namely "imaginaries of model citizens," that underlie three science and public initiatives: public understanding of science, public engagement in science, and citizen science. While imaginaries of citizens are performative and necessary to these initiatives, they are often relegated to the background. I argue that such imaginaries are the result of a complex of perceptions on the nature of science, the role of democracy in scientific activities, and the form of "democratizing" science. The imaginary of model citizens in public understanding of science is of literate citizens who should know science sufficiently, use it in daily life, and support science; in public engagement in science, the model citizen is a responsible one who should engage in the governance of technoscientific issues; and in citizen science, a contributive one who should partake in and enjoy creating scientific knowledge.

Intra-mediary expertise: Trans-science and expert understanding of the public.

What is the role of experts and their expertise in the context of trans-science, in which issues that are raised in scientific terms cannot be answered by science alone? This article examines the discourses and practices around safety of low-dose exposure to radiation in the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in Japan in 2011. Following the nuclear fallout, scientific experts and STS scholars in Japan debated what forms of science communication were adequate to address the situation. Ethnographic research and textual analysis of their debates show a shift in emphasis on the role of experts from cultivating 'public understanding of science' for the sake of science and policy to an 'expert understanding of the public' for the sake of the public and its diverse everyday concerns. Two forms of expertise are emerging: 'co-expertise' and 'intra-mediary expertise'. Both are parts of a transition from a paternalistic form of expertise to one that acknowledges the need to engage the public to address issues of scientific uncertainty. However, co-expertise ultimately upholds the existing political structures that shape risk governance, while intra-mediary expertise engages those often excluded from current structures of accountability. Discussion of the potentials and limitations of emerging forms of expertise in Japan show that epistemic justice is not enough. Civic justice that acknowledges diverse publics and their needs must be upheld in the uncertain sphere between science, politics, and everyday life.

How do New Zealand Scientists perceive the benefits and limitation of Citizen Science?

Public engagement with science in New Zealand adopted a more participatory approach with the 2014 launch of the Strategic Plan for Science in Society, joining the groundswell of citizen science research seen internationally. This study interrogates the views of scientists on the benefits and limitations of citizen science (CS) before and several years after the strategy was launched. Three groups of scientists were compared: NZ marine scientists with an international group of marine scientists around the time of launch, and NZ marine scientists four years later. At initial comparison NZ and international scientists held largely similar views on the benefits and limitations of CS, with only a few exceptions. Awareness of and involvement in CS projects were significantly higher in NZ four years later. Scientists with CS experience generally perceived more benefits, such as expanded data collection, community engagement and public awareness of science. The most frequently identified limitation was quality of data. Although this perception increased in the NZ cohort, the vast majority of scientists felt limitations could be overcome by careful project design and improved infrastructure support and professional recognition. These findings guide further recommendations for high level support systems to facilitate scientists’ involvement in citizen science.

Diversity and classic sociologists: Theorising the concept of the Traveller by Harriet Martineau

Harriet Martineau’s early sociological publication, How to observe Morals and Manners (1838a) has received attention as one of the works that provided a more diverse foundation for the social sciences. This article examines the content of this pre-disciplinary text and explores the value of a simple and valuable concept Martineau offers: the Traveller. It is argued that theorisation of this concept contributes to a more diverse foundation for the history of the social sciences by (1) highlighting the subject of the researcher, (2) rediscovering a set of requisites for research inspired by skilled scepticism and (3) opening up more communicative knowledge production, that is, knowledge that is in line with 21st century dialogical sociology and public understanding of science.

Work and the public understanding of science.

This study examines whether engaging in science work and work that is substantively complex (e.g. requiring independent thought and judgment) is related to interest in science, science knowledge, and confidence in the scientific community in the United States. It also examines whether the conditions of work mediate the relationship between education and these science-related outcomes. Occupation-level data from O*NET are merged with survey data from the General Social Survey. Results indicate that science work is related to interest in science and science knowledge and that work complexity is related to confidence in the scientific community. Results offer only limited evidence of mediation-science work mediates the relationship between educational attainment and science knowledge but not the relationships involving interest or confidence. In sum, results indicate that the conditions of work are associated with science attitudes, and that researchers should examine these connections in future research.

National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science

National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science

A bibliometric overview of science communication research in STEM education

Science communication has recently gained importance in many countries worldwide. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis to evaluate the scientific output of science communication in STEM education in the SCOPUS database for 2000-2022. For this purpose, the published studies on science communication were analyzed bibliometrically, and the trend of the last 22 years was shown. The database SCOPUS was used for data collection. The studies were analyzed under the following subheadings: Number of publications per year, type of publications, the language of publications, citation analysis, country collaborations, common citation networks, and conceptual trends. The results showed that the number of articles increased between 2019 and 2022. The United States and the United Kingdom had the most publications. The results also showed that the countries with the most collaboration in co-authored studies were Germany, the United States, Finland, Australia, and the Netherlands. Most published authors were mainly from the United States and Australia. The results of peer-reviewed journals demonstrated that the highest bibliographic link strengths included the International Journal of Science Education-Part B, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Communication, Public Understanding of Science, and Journal of Science Communication. In addition, the most frequently used keywords were science communication, science education, education, human, communication, public understanding of science, and stem. Educational implications are drawn in the conclusion.

КОММУНИКАЦИЯ НАУКИ И ОБЩЕСТВА В РАБОТАХ ЗАРУБЕЖНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЕЙ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОЙ БАЗЫ ДАННЫХ PROQUEST DISSERTATIONS & THESES)

Science communication or communication of science and society has become very important in 21st century because of an ever-growing role of science and technology in people’s lives. People themselves have in turn increasingly been engaged in science and technology decision-making. Science communication has been researched abroad for several decades, became meanwhile an independent field of study of which dissertations and thesis are a part. This article describes the collection of international doctoral dissertations included in the world’s most comprehensive repository ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Global (PQDT). Taking into consideration the global terminology controversy and the lack of a unified definition of “science communication”, the first stage of study was a combined keyword search using the search terms selected from the PQDT index: attitudes towards science, citizen science, popularization of science, post normal science, public engagement with science, public understanding of science, science communication, scientific literacy. The search resulted in 2213 dissertations written in 1950–2022 in 11 languages from 19 countries. Further analysis showed that the most active research is being carried out in the USA, China, and the UK. 77 % of the works were written in English, 22 % in Chinese. The first works dated back to the 1950s, but an exponential increase in the number of dissertations began only in the 1980s and could be explained by a new policy making formulated in many countries in the second half of the 1980s to ensure developing and improving science communication. At the second stage, another search was carried out for each term separately to have a picture of trends. It is revealed that until the early 2000s the main dissertation topics were attitude towards science and scientific literacy. In the 2000s, such developing topics as public engagement with science, citizen science, and post-normal science reflected the changing nature of science communication and the transition from the one-way communication model “from scientists to public” to models of public participation and engagement. Since the 2010s, research interests have been shifted to public engagement and new ways of scientists and non-scientists interaction. One of the most actively developing directions is the co-production of knowledge aka citizen science, but the problem of scientific literacy also still remains relevant.

Metaphors as tools for understanding in science communication among experts and to the public

Abstract Science communication is highly important in present-day society. But mere factual information transfer does not suffice for enhancing public understanding of scientific results, theories, and concepts. In this paper we compare science communication among experts with communication from experts to laypeople, to better understand the role of metaphors in constructing understanding of abstract scientific concepts. As a case study, we analyze specialist and non-specialist scientific articles on epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene expression not altering DNA sequence. The results of our analysis show that there is no substantial difference between the two types of articles in frequency of metaphors and in their content. However, the function of the metaphors is different: the figurative aspect of metaphors is employed for public understanding but plays no role in specialist scientific articles. We outline the implications of these results for current philosophical debates on scientific understanding and public understanding of science: (1) metaphors are tools for rendering theoretical concepts intelligible, for both expert and lay audiences; (2) expert and public understanding differ in degree rather than in kind; (3) conveying understanding crucially involves skills: metaphors in this context do not so much add knowledge as enhance relevant conceptual reasoning abilities.

The case of cultural schizophrenia: Alleged tampering with DNA codes via Covid-19 vaccines

The covid pandemic, which started in December 2019, was announced with a delay of two months in many developing countries like Turkey. With the announcement of the first cases in Turkey in the second week of March 2020, it became clear that a precise different situation would be experienced in the socioeconomic and health fields, whichpeople had never faced before. Also, It took time for the World Health Organization to decide whether Covid-19 was a pandemic or an endemic. Meanwhile, the first problem faced by the public was the contradictory statements made by politicians about what happened. However, the issue that everyone discussed the most was the immune system and the biopolitics of politicians regarding the covid -19 vaccine and its development process. Public understanding of science has led governments to be unable to eliminate covid-related manipulations during covid’s evolution from endemic to the pandemic. After a while, governments tried to cover up the lack of vaccination by using these manipulations by the media. This whole process was built on the biopolitics of immunization and eventually led to the strengthening of public opposition to vaccines. The first aim of this article is to present how the government’s science communication strategy in Turkey has developed a collective resistance to vaccines through a case study. This analysis applies the “Four Moments” processes from Michael Callon’s article “Law, Power, action, and Belief: a new sociology of knowledge.” In addition, the article aims to show the underlying reasons for the anti-vaccination opposition that has been experienced in Turkey in the last two years and has grown stronger over time.

Public engagement as rhetoric, persuasion as practice

More than two decades ago the Public Engagement with Science and Technology (PEST) paradigm gained influence in the field of science communication, marked by the publication of the third report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology in the year 2000. The approach advocated in the report went beyond the traditional Public Understanding of Science (PUS) paradigm that had focused on sharing scientific knowledge with broader publics via top-down dissemination. It assigned citizens a more active and powerful role vis a vis science, emphasized the need for participatory discourses aiming at a shared understanding with non-scientific publics, and acknowledged both citizens' democratic rights regarding science-related decisions and their potential constructive contributions in the creation of socially relevant knowledge.

Just another clickbait title: A corpus-driven investigation of negative attitudes toward science on Reddit.

The public understanding of science has produced a large body of research about general attitudes toward science. However, most studies of science attitudes have been carried out via surveys or in experimental conditions, and few make use of the growing contexts of online science communication to investigate attitudes without researcher intervention. This study adopted corpus-based discourse analysis to investigate the negative attitudes held toward science by users of the social media website Reddit, specifically the forum r/science. A large corpus of comments made to r/science was collected and mined for keywords. Analysis of keywords identified several sources of negative attitudes, such as claims that scientists can be corruptible, poor communicators, and misleading. Research methodologies were negatively evaluated on the basis of small sample sizes. Other commenters negatively evaluated social science research, especially psychology, as being pseudoscientific, and several commenters described science journalism as untrustworthy or sensationalized.

SCIENCE PR STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNICATING ASTRONOMY: THE CASE OF ESA AND HUBBLE 15TH ANNIVERSARY PROJECT

By implementing Hubble 15th Anniversary project (2005), the European Space Agency (ESA) follows the new realities of Public Relations and science communication which apply to research institutes concerned with astronomy. The mix between the principles of popular culture and the Public Understanding of Science (PUS) movement represents the theoretical foundation of an active and efficient communication strategy, intended for the promotion of a positive attitude among the public towards the opportunities of scientific research. By using all the means offered by popular culture, Hubble 15th Anniversary project suggested a range of cultural products and events (Hubble Days events, DVDs, Hubble-themed gadgets etc.) which combined information with entertainment and which managed to materialize a science PR strategy based on the realities of popular culture.

Media visibility as a driver of scientific and social impact

Well-known paradigms such as public understanding of science, public engagement in science and technology, and media visibility affect the perception of science in society but also the dynamics of the relationship between scientists, the public, and the media. The digital environment and social media have pushed the boundaries and created different aspects of visibility but have also raised issues such as the risk of data theft, misuse, manipulation or out-of-context use. Not only can media manipulate scientifically accurate information but can also spread misinformation.It is argued that science must be visible not only to scientists but also to the public in order to gain legitimacy, advance knowledge, promote positive attitudes, and increase engagement. This kind of visibility is at the forefront of the open science movement, which advocates transparency, openness, and reproducibility.Media and the digital environment have exponentially increased the availability of scientific knowledge to the general public and encouraged a growing number of scientists to tell their own stories on social networks or actively participate in public and media discussions, gaining in popularity along the way. The question arises, does this personal popularity contribute to the overall popularity of science and does it increase awareness of its significant impact on society and technology? Also, there is a continuous fear that scientific knowledge is vulnerable to misunderstanding or misinterpretation.This panel entitled Media visibility as a driver of scientific and social influence will discuss perspectives based on trust, transparency, and ethics in communication between scientists and journalists and take a look at activities that can increase the visibility of science in the media, challenges involved, and at the role of scientists and their reputation in communication with the general public. We will also discuss the limit(ation)s of strategic management of visibility, especially online, which can very quickly become uncontrolled, damage a reputation or two, and expose scientists to public criticism and even hostility.

Science, religion, and nonreligion: Engaging subdisciplines to move further beyond mythbusting

Within the last 20 years sociological research on science and religion has provided new insights that challenge myths regarding conflicts between science and religion. Gaps in pre-existing work have been identified resulting in major shifts in the field. In particular, research has employed more mixed methods, widened its scope to become more international, and expanded to include nonreligion. Building upon these developments and critiques, this chiefly conceptual article explores a way to move forward by combining three fields of research in a novel way: the sociology of religion, the sociology of nonreligion, and the Public Understanding of Science (PUS). These subfields all touch on relevant and interrelated topics. Sociology of religion contributes to parceling out aspects of belief, identity, and practice; focuses on lived experience along with positionality, normative commitments, and culture. The sociology of nonreligion draws more detailed attention to the association between science and secularism. Finally, including research on PUS provides resources for understanding trust in, and engagement with science dialogically, as well as lessons for effective public engagement.

Elusive science cultures

The latest in a growing number of edited volumes that take science communication as a phenomenon to be explored through science cultures is a rich book full of theoretical and methodological rigour. There are 17 chapters included here from 33 authors across 16 different countries containing selected paper contributions from the 2018 Science & You conference in Beijing jointly organised by the Chinese National Academy of Innovation Strategy and the University of Lorraine, France. With an opening address by Massimiano Bucchi, chapters are arranged thematically, with emphasis on the roles of institutions, state and media in the social dynamics and public understandings of science and technology across global cultures.

EPOS Thematic Core Service Anthropogenic Hazards in the operational phase

The problem of hazards induced by the exploitation of geo-resources focuses growing interest of science, industry, public administration, non-governmental organisations and the general public. Anthropogenic seismicity, i.e. the undesired dynamic rock mass response to geo-resources exploitation, is one of the examples of unwanted by-products of the technological operation of humans. The socio-economic impact of the induced seismicity is very significant. Induced earthquakes can cause material loss, injuries and even fatalities. Restricted access to data constitutes a barrier to assessing and mitigating the associated hazards. To respond to the need of the scientific community the Thematic Core Service Anthropogenic Hazards (TCS AH) has been created within the framework of the European Plate Observing System, a solid earth science European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). TCS AH is an open consortium of 13 European institutions. TCS AH provides access to a novel e-research infrastructure, the EPISODES Platform (former name: IS-EPOS platform) to foster both research and training on induced seismicity and geo-hazards related to the exploration and exploitation of geo-resources. The EPISODES Platform is connected to international data nodes which offer open access to multidisciplinary datasets, called episodes. Episodes comprise geoscientific and associated data from industrial activity along with a large set of embedded applications for their efficient data processing, analysis and visualization. The EPISODES Platform opens also the possibility to create new applications and combine implemented applications with the user's codes. The team-working features of the EPISODES Platform facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary scientific research, public understanding of science, citizen science applications, knowledge dissemination, and the teaching of anthropogenic hazards related to geo-resource exploitation. This study presents the current results of the TCS AH research infrastructure integration and also indicates the benefits of their usage for science, education, and innovation.

The Number Needed to Inform - What we talk about when we talk of science journalism

The role and the quality of science journalism – and particularly health journalism – are often debated in peer-reviewed research, along with their direct and indirect consequences on science, science policy, the public understanding of science and of course public health. Researchers have been trying to apply their methods to a discipline which differs very much from their own, for instance proposing an evaluation grid similar to...