Public Understanding of Science

Whether biotechnology is one or several developments is not clear. Once distinctions are required, the question is: Which one prevails? When the good, the bad, and the ugly settle, where do they fall? Evaluation implies distinction, and representation drives attitude. The controversies over biotechnology are fertile ground on which to study these issues. The imports of genetically modified (GM) soya into Europe in 1996-97 and the cloning of Dolly the sheep from adult cells in 1997 changed the symbolic environment for genetic engineering. The ensuing public controversies came to focus mainly on field trials of GM crops and food labeling. This paper will explore the relationship between quality press coverage and public perception, in particular the cultivation of the contrast between “desirable” biomedical (RED) and “undesirable” agri-food (GREEN) biotechnology in Britain. The argument draws on a systematic analysis of the British press coverage of biotechnology from 1973 to 1999 and analysis of public perceptions in 1996 and 1999. The paper concludes that the debate over GM crops and food ingredients fostered the RED-GREEN contrast among the newspaper-reading public, thereby shielding RED biotechnology from public controversy, and ushered in a realignment of the regulatory framework in 2000.

In Switzerland, there have been intensive public debates about biotechnology because of the specific Swiss political system of direct democracy that led, in 1992 and 1998, to two national referenda on biotechnology regulation. As a result, the Swiss population is well informed but skeptical about this technology. These findings contrast with the deficit model of public understanding of science, which predicts a positive correlation between knowledge of, and support for, a specific technology. What role did the media play in the development of public opinion? This question is discussed because of a content analysis (time series) of national newspapers. In addition, representative surveys and focus groups yield insights into the public perception of biotechnology and the influence of mass communication for opinion formation.

This paper addresses the issue of public perception of modern biotechnology in the Netherlands. Contrary to expectations, data from the 1999 Eurobarometer on biotechnology indicate that the position of the Dutch public in general is rather ambiguous, which is in contrast to many of its neighboring countries. The issue is described in terms of differences between the Netherlands and other European countries on political-economic, social-cultural, or media coverage indicators. On many indicators, the Dutch population differs from that of other European countries, and the Dutch opinion-leading media present a rather balanced perspective on modern biotechnology.

The following article deals with the different images of modern biotechnology created by the German press in the last decade of the twentieth century. To describe these images we have chosen the theoretical concept of framing, which in general denotes the idea that the media deal with certain issues in different ways and that therefore the coverage offers different perspectives to the reader. We understand a frame as a certain pattern of a text that is composed of several different text elements. We assume that some of these text elements group together systematically in a specific way, thereby forming a certain pattern that can be identified across several texts in a sample. These patterns we call frames. By means of cluster analysis we are able to identify not only predefined but also newly emerging frames and the way framing of an issue changes over time. This methodological approach allows us to give a dynamic overview of how the German press dealt with biotechnology in the early and late nineties.

Over the past decade, several influential papers examining the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes toward science have been published. The 1992 Eurobarometer has been the preferred source of data for analysis, and a number of suggestive conclusions regarding the extent and nature of the links between knowledge and attitudes have been proposed. Summated scales were built through principal component analysis of the attitudinal items and reliability analysis, but little attention has been paid to the content of the attitudinal items and to the metric and conceptual weaknesses of the scales. A more parsimonious revision of the data, carried out here, shows that the measures used are fuzzy and, as a consequence, the empirical support for some published results is very limited. We suggest that more theoretical effort should be devoted to the design of questionnaires and to the combined use of statistical exploratory techniques and qualitative analysis in the interpretation of the data.

This paper examines the growth and development of the literature of “environmental communication” research. The paper collects citations of all papers matching specified keywords covering environmental communication topics in the social science journal literature from relevant indices. The indices used were: the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science), the ISI Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Web of Science), Communication Abstracts, PsycINFO, Anthropological Literature, Sociology Abstracts and Periodical Abstracts (Pro-Quest Direct). The paper analyzes the collected citations for journal of publication, date, and frequency of publication by year, author, and keywords and topics. The paper shows what topics of attention, what fields, and what journals have been interested in publishing environmental communication research, and some of the authors leading the way. In addition, basic topics of interest for environmental communication research are discerned. The literature review shows the need for a more centralized point of publication for environmental communication research.