Showing papers in "Public Understanding of Science in 1992"

Misunderstood misunderstanding: social identities and public uptake of science:

Abstract: This paper draws general insights into the public reception of scientific knowledge from a case study of Cumbrian sheep farmers' responses to scientific advice about the restrictions introduced after the Chernobyl radioactive fallout. The analysis identifies several substantive factors which influence the credibility of scientific communication. Starting from the now-accepted point that public uptake of science depends primarily upon the trust and credibility public groups are prepared to invest in scientific institutions and representatives, the paper observes that these are contingent upon the social relationships and identities which people feel to be affected by scientific knowledge, which never comes free of social interests or implications. The case study shows laypeople capable of extensive informal reflection upon their social relationships towards scientific experts, and on the epistemological status of their own `local' knowledge in relation to `outside' knowledge. Public uptake of science might...

Public understanding of science research: new horizons or hall of mirrors?:

Abstract: In the still relatively immature state of research on public understanding of science, a useful approach to the question of what should be done next may be to recount one or two experiences from the research front and offer some reflections on what they mean. I lay no claim to offer a systematic and exhaustive research agenda, but the questions thus highlighted invite us to think about where some taken-for-granted problem-definitions have come from, and how they could be fruitfully reoriented and linked with other areas of science studies. The most important general claim I shall make is that problems in public understanding of science reflect problems in the representation, organization and control-the broad political culture-of science which need to be brought out from the shadows in which they have been placed by the dominant approach.

Mass media coverage of technological and environmental risks: a survey of research in the United States and Germany:

Abstract: Research on media communication of risks has become a reasonably well funded and popular domain for scholars around the world. Although one can find a great deal of collaboration among these scholars within countries, cross-cultural collaborations are far more rare. In this article, an American and a German scholar attempt to bring results from studies in both their countries to bear on some of the more popular questions being asked by risk communication researchers and practitioners. With a few exceptions, studies from the two countries demonstrate highly consonant results, suggesting great similarities between (1) the general social and technological cultures of these two developed countries, (2) the ways in which their scientific and journalistic cultures deal with the concept of risk, and (3) the ways in which risk communication researchers in these two countries conceptualize and operationalize this domain of inquiry. The review concentrates on studies that examine the construction of risk stories by...

Gender, parental and peer influences upon science attitudes and activities:

Abstract: This paper explores the extent to which variance in science attitudes and involvement in science activities may be attributable to gender, parental and peer influences upon 11-14 year olds in the U...

The meaning of `public understanding of science' in the United States after World War II

Abstract: In the United States after World War II, the term `public understanding of science' became equated with `public appreciation of the benefits that science provides to society'. This equation was the result of the independent, but parallel, social and institutional needs of four different groups with an interest in popularizing science: commercial publishers, scientific societies, science journalists, and government agencies. A new, more critical era of popular science began in the 1960s.

Public understanding of science in Britain: the role of medicine in the popular representation of science

Abstract: This paper is based on the results of a random sample survey of the adult population of Britain. The survey was designed to explore public interest in, attitudes towards and understanding of science. The paper operationalizes the notion of scientific understanding, and applies the understanding measure in the analysis of social representations of science. The results suggest: first, that a so-called `deficit model' of public understanding of science is useful for certain well-defined analytical purposes; second, that there are significant differences between professional and popular representations of science, and third, that medical science may be paradigmatic for the popular representation of science in Britain.

Framing science and technology in the Canadian press

Abstract: This paper reports on a content analysis of science coverage in seven major Canadian daily newspapers. The study focused specifically on the images of science promoted in the media via the topics portrayed more frequently, the patterns of source use, and types of news formats. Also examined were the stories' overall tone, the consequences of science presented, and the ways in which processes of science were described. Underlying these descriptions were the theoretical notions of `agenda-setting' and `framing'.Results showed that science and technology stories were not prominent in terms of their frequency and placement. They tended to be hard news stories—that is, they tended to be event-oriented, time-bound reports—and were more often originated by the wire services rather than by local efforts. The majority were medical stories, followed by environmental items. These science stories were predominantly positive in tone. Consequences portrayed tended to vary with type of story; that is, environmental stor...

About misunderstandings about misunderstandings

Abstract: Many recent studies have stressed the poor understanding of science by the general public, even at a very elementary level.’ That a large fraction of the people cannot say whether the Sun is revolving around the Earth, or whether the converse is true, is the archetypal finding of these studies. They usually conclude by deploring this state of affairs and urging that a stronger effort he made to spread scientific literacy. While I do not dispute the existence of such wide knowledge gaps, I wonder whether we are not, more or less consciously, cultivating some misunderstandings of our own about what we call the ‘public misunderstanding’ of science. When discussing the public understanding of science, a serious, hut current fallacy is to equate the ‘public’ with ‘laypeople’, that is, ‘non-scientists’. However, it must he recognized that we all, scientists and non-scientists alike, share a common ‘public misunderstanding of science’. Indeed, given the present state of scientific specialization, ignorance about a particular domain of science is almost as great among scientists working in another domain as it is among laypeople. In other words, there is no single general knowledge gap between scientists and non-scientists, but there is instead a multitude of specific gaps between specialists and non-specialists in each field. Science is not a large island separated from the mainland of culture, hut a vast and scattered archipelago of islets, often farther apart from one another than from the continent. An expert in one field is a non-expert in almost all others and, as such, is very close to the absolute layperson as far as scientific culture in general is concerned. It would he most interesting, in that respect, to submit scientists to the tests of scientific literacy usually inflicted upon laypeople. Conversely, it is crucial to stress that if scientists are definitely not universal experts, non-scientists are not universal non-experts. Any active member of a complex technical society such as ours, must develop a large degree of expertise in many areas. Most people have rather elaborate skills and are experts, albeit unrecognized ones, in various domains. These domains may not he strictly scientific, hut they are often very sophisticated and highly technical ones-such as cooking, tinkering, accounting, housekeeping, socializing, etc. As an example of a field where the public’s lack of knowledge is often mentioned and lamented upon, consider the case of nuclear

Toward a scientific understanding of the public understanding of science and technology

Abstract: Over the last three decades, the study of the public understanding of science and technology has become a visible and recognized area of scholarship. It is certainly not an academic discipline, and probably not a viable field of study apart from other strong disciplinary roots, but it has produced a cluster of coherent and related research. One might characterize the area as bringing together relevant theoretical constructs from a variety of disciplines to improve our understanding of a contemporary problem. To a large extent, the empirical study of the public understanding of science began with a 1957 national survey of American adults, sponsored by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and the Rockefeller Foundation. Stimulated by a need to better understand the size and needs of the audience for science writing, this survey of approximately 1900 US adults examined media consumption patterns generally, media consumption patterns specific to science and technology, attitudes toward scientific and technological issues, and, to a limited extent, citizen participation in the formulation of science and technology policy.’ It included only a few substantive knowledge items and those were sufficiently applied and contemporary (polio vaccine, strontium-90) to be of little use for time series measurements. Interestingly, the interviewing for the 1957 NASW study was completed only a couple of weeks prior to the launch of Sputnik I, thus providing the only available measurements of the public understanding of science and technology prior to the beginning of the era of space exploration. As a major baseline data set, many of the items from the 1957 study have been repeated in subsequent studies and are the basis of our conceptions of the rate and direction of change in the public understanding of science and technology. Fifteen years passed before the resumption of regular data collection in the United States concerning the public understanding of science and technology, and, even then, the focus was primarily on attitudes rather than understanding. Beginning in 1972, the National Science Board initiated a biennial series of reports known as Science Indicators that are transmitted to the Congress by the President as a status report on American science and technology.’ It was decided that one chapter in each of these reports would focus on public attitudes toward science and technology and a limited set of questions were commissioned in an omnibus national survey. The items focused primarily on broad general attitudes toward science and technology and a few more

How to think about the `anti-science' phenomenon:

Abstract: Opposition to science as conventionally defined can take a great variety of forms, from interest in astrology to attacks on relativity theory, from false beliefs based on scientific illiteracy to s...

Science on display: the representation of scientific controversy in museum exhibitions

Abstract: This article raises issues concerning popular representations of science, and in particular of scientific controversy, through a case-study of the treatment of food poisoning controversy in a museu...

Health and medical coverage in the UK national press

Abstract: The growth of UK public interest in health in the last decade is reflected by the inclusion in most national newspapers of regular health or medical sections. These potentially allow subjects to be covered in detail, with more background information and useful advice. This paper reports on a content analysis study of eight national newspapers, which aimed to obtain an overview of press health coverage, to compare the coverage of popular and quality papers, and to analyse differences in health topic coverage between 1981 and 1990. The subject coverage, information provision and presentation of health related articles were considered. The most common subject categories were diseases, preventive medicine (including diet and exercise) and the National Health Service. Class inequalities in health received very little coverage. Clear differences were confirmed between quality broadsheet and popular tabloid newspapers. Quality papers provided more scientific information about health and paid more attention to po...

Chernobyl coverage: how the US media treated the nuclear industry:

Abstract: This study attempted to uncover whether enough background information about nuclear power and the nuclear industries in the USA, USSR and Eastern and Western Europe had been included during the fir...

`Chernobyl' reaches Norway: the accident, science, and the threat to cultural knowledge

Abstract: This report is interested in the transitions that `Chernobyl' underwent in Norway. It `arrived' as a ghastly accident: important cultural routines were disturbed, apprehension ran high, and the country waited for scientists to `repair' the accident. By the following year, `Chernobyl' was but a memory for most of the population. The scourge of radiation, however, still covered much of the countryside of central Norway. Reindeer pastures were heavily polluted, and among Saami (Lapp) groups there arose a cognitive sense of disruption to a way of life. Ambivalent relations—at times cooperative, more often adversarial—developed among the Saami in respect to the outside experts who strove to bring the radiation problem under control. The report (with anthropological fieldwork) strives to show how much of the problem of `Chernobyl', in this later phase, had to do with the different nature of the claims of two kinds of knowledge: the outside scientists' and the Saami pastoralists'.

The credibility of information sources in West Germany after the Chernobyl disaster

Abstract: In West Germany the `information disaster' after Chernobyl offered an opportunity to study the credibility of different information sources. A representative survey conducted in May 1987 of the West German population showed that on average the Federal Government—although heavily criticized because of its information policy and risk management—was rated most credible while the nuclear industry was judged least credible. On the whole, mean credibility ratings differed surprisingly little between sources; ratings of competence and public interest orientation varied more. These variables, interpreted as the classical credibility factors `expertise' and `trustworthiness', were important predictors of credibility. But beliefs and expectations recipients posess about individual sources also appear to influence credibility.

Siting a hazardous waste facility: the tangled web of risk communication

Abstract: In 1990, the Australian government tried to establish a national hazardous waste incinerator in rural New South Wales. This paper considers the debates over the risks associated with hazardous waste incineration that emerged and the symbolic portrayal of technology implicit in these debates. Risk communications associated with technologies convey a message about how technological systems are shaped, implemented and operated. In this case, government officials succumbed to the temptation to employ an idealistic model of technology in an attempt to gain community acceptance for the proposed incinerator. They depicted incinerator technology as predictable and controllable, and separable from the social context. Opponents reacted by employing a `worse case' model; they represented incinerator technology as unreliable, uncertain and uncontrollable. Neither side deliberately lied: each put forward a view of technology that furthered its own goals. The polarized positions that resulted are not uncommon in techno...

The challenge for scholars of popularized science communication: explaining ourselves:

Abstract: I was lucky. More than 15 years ago, when I began doing research on the ways in which scientific and technological information gets reconstituted for public consumption, I did not have to dwell on reasons why. I did it because it was interesting. Some years earlier, as a beginning newspaper reporter, I was given the science heat almost by accident (1 showed up in the newsroom the day after the science writer had left). My initial feeling of panic matured into a passion for science, and I have devoted myself ever since to exploring the relationships between journalism and science and, more recently, to understanding what audiences do with the types of science information they encounter in the mass media. Passion is not a bad thing. It is crucial, I suspect, to good and enduring scholarship. But young scholars today must construct more substantive rationales for committing to particular subspecialties. That is particularly the case, I think, for those interested in popular science communication, which is attracting increasing numbers of scholars around the world. What is it about popularized scientific information, my more querulous colleagues ask, that permits-nay, encourages-the level of scholarly scrutiny that is rarely devoted to other content areas? I would like to try to answer that question in this brief essay. Our colleagues’ queries are important catalysts, for a field that can defend itself only affectively (with passion) and not cognitively (with rationales) is a weak one indeed. Additionally, any one scholar’s reasons why a field of enquiry has value can serve as statements of research priorities. Thus, I can fulfil the official mandate of this essay while indulging my own need to understand why we do what we do.

Chernobyl: the inevitable results of secrecy

Abstract: The Chernobyl accident was the inevitable outcome of a combination of bad design, bad management and bad communication practices in the Soviet nuclear industry. We review the causes of the accident, its impact on Soviet society, and its effects on the health of the population in the surrounding areas. It appears that the secrecy that was endemic in the USSR has had profound negative effects on both technological safety and public health.

Industrial life insurance, public health campaigns, and public communication of science, 1908-1951

Abstract: During the first half of the twentieth century, private life insurance companies in the United States provided an important locus for the public communication of science, through their support of public health campaigns. This paper provides a history of how and why three companies (the Metropolitan, the Prudential, and the John Hancock life insurance companies) drew on their strength in `industrial' life insurance (sold to the lower classes at low, weekly rates) to engage in public health reforms. Only the Metropolitan and the Hancock, however, became active in public communication of health information. The paper suggests that four key factors provided the context for the companies' activities: (1) legislative and social pressure for reform; (2) increases in profits associated with healthier (and therefore longer-lived) customers; (3) ideals of social reform held by individuals in positions of bureaucratic power within the insurance organizations; and (4) organized machinery for weekly contact with and d...

Epidemiology, the press and the EMF controversy

Abstract: Epidemiological study of the adverse health effects from exposure to electromagnetic fields has become an issue of public concern over the past decade. The public, in general, rely on mass media co...

Public understanding in a science centre

Abstract: Let us accept the following working hypothesis: scientific communication in a science centre is based on a belief and a method. The belief is that the same thrust that drives a scientist to practise science also urges the ordinary person in the street to become interested in science. The method is to use anything that helps encourage or promote this belief, that is, any method that manages to put the layperson into the scientist’s ‘skin’. What drives a scientist to do research? Scientists share with everyone else the need to find out about their world. Science differs from other forms of knowledge in one respect: the method used in its elaboration. And there is one aspect of this method, the scientific method, that encourages and propels the researcher’s work, and that is the experiment. Carrying out experiments is an attempt to open a dialogue with nature. Not all the questions are right and it is not always clear whether a specific question should be asked. That’s why there’s not always an answer, or at least, there isn’t always an answer that helps to produce knowledge. But when there is one, when nature suddenly deigns to answer with something which is intelligible, then that is the time when communication between people and the natural world has begun. This is the source of scientist’s passion, which can be compared in another field to the moment of passion in art (i.e., when the creator of a piece of work communicates with a particular observer through that work). These passions are, I believe, the actual motors of knowledge (either scientific or artistic). What a science centre tries to do is to bring the ordinary person in the street to that point, to create an emotion that opens the door to communication. The hope is then to succeed in taking advantage of that ‘emotional state’ in order to produce scientific understanding. However, we must ask ourselves if a method to achieve such a thing actually exists. First, let us accept that the basic requirement is to provoke nature in order to get an answer from it directly, by our own request and without any mediator. A whole stream of key questions arises here such as how to select the contents of a science centre, and what kind of scientific understanding should be suggested. A method for scientific communication should guide us in finding answers to these questions. An idea that is compatible with our starting point consists of agreeing that the method we are looking for should look, as much as possible, like the scientific method itself. In other words, the method to be used in order to communicate science should approach the method used to produce science: understanding science is the same as understanding in science. But first, let us agree on some definitions.

`The star called Wormwood': the cause and effect of the Chernobyl catastrophe

Abstract: The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 astounded the world. It was shocking not just because of the technical failure—unfortunately such things happen from time to time—but as a social and political failure. The Chernobyl catastrophe undermined and exposed the false, vicious and inhumane Soviet totalitarian system. The Chernobyl explosion initiated the disintegration of the corrupt Communist regime—a regime which had been deemed unshakeable in the USSR.

Science, animal rights, and the polemics of `clear thinking':

Abstract: The struggle over the validity of a concept of ‘animal rights’ has traditionally been fought by a few men and women of impassioned conviction. In recent years, however, members of the larger public have been increasingly pulled into the debate and challenged to vote with their ballots and with their money. Judging by the popularity of such stores as The Body Shop (which sells cosmetics’that have not been tested on animals), the dramatic rise in membership of such organizations as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and the range of successful drives to pass legislation limiting the uses of animals in experimental settings, the men and women of conviction are beginning to get their case across. In one recent poll in the USA sponsored by Parent Magazine, the overwhelming majority of respondents felt that animals had some ‘rights’ that forbade humans doing with them whatever they pleased.’ While most US surveys suggest that a majority of the public still favours the use of animals in medical research, there is no longer clear support for the use of animals in ‘pure’ research without clear social benefit, or in ‘trivial’ research with perhaps a profit motive (such as cosmetics research). In Britain, sentiment is, if anything, even more disapproving. A Gallup poll sponsored by the Daily Telegraph found that one in two respondents felt that animal experimentation should be banned or further restricted. Among younger people (16-24 years), the proportion was 70%.2 Visceral propaganda strategies such as pictures of doe-eyed seal cubs destined for slaughter by clubbing, and of squirming monkeys trapped in experimental devices, have surely played a role in these changes in sentiment; but it would be misleading to see the movement for ‘animal rights’ merely as a chapter in the sociology of sentimentality. Recent general-interest articles across a wide spectrum of sources have also begun to debate the more formal ethical and philosophical principles of the animal rights movement. As a result, more and more people today are familiar with the concept of ‘speciesism’, an idea at the heart of the animal rights movement that took its present form in the work of Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher living in the United States. In 1976 Singer published a book, Animal Liberation, that quickly became a canonical text for animal rightists. In this book, Singer claimed that placing