Public Understanding of Science

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 technological controversies, and environmental groups are often branded as alarmist on this account. But there is some evidence in this case study that messages of reassurance also communicate insincerity and leave proponents of a technology vulnerable to having their claims easily deconstructed by the opposition.

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.

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 UK. The data presented are derived from a sample of 391 pupils drawn at random, but stratified by age and gender, from Local Education Authority schools (i.e. schools within the state sector where parents make no direct payments for education). A self-completion questionnaire was administered to the pupils in school. Attitudes toward scientific change, involvement in scientific extra-curricular activity, liking and performance in school science subjects, and participation in peer youth culture were indexed, in addition to estimates of the amount of positive regard for science expressed by peers and parents.

Boys had more positive attitudes to science and greater levels of participation in scientific extra-curricular activities. They also reported performing better at school science than girls. A positive attitude to science was strongly positively related to having a father and mother who support science, coming from a lower socio-economic family background, being male, and having scientific peers. Greater involvement in scientific extra-curricular activities was predicted by having a father who supports science, having parents who engage in activities jointly with their children, and having scientific peers.

In terms of predicting participation in science, liking of it and success at it, these data lead to the conclusion that both parental and peer support are influential. Though it does seem that they are relatively more important in predicting variance in attitudes to science in society than as indicators of liking of or performance at school science. The problems involved in estimating whether commonly reported gender effects are mediated through peer or parental support are discussed.

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 journalists but offers a framework within which to examine story effects as well.