From 30 November to 2 December politicians and academics convened at the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin (WZB) for a major international conference on the public understanding of science, chaired by Meinolf Dierkes. Sponsored in part by the European Commission (DG XII), the conference aimed to evaluate the EUROBAROMETER, the European-wide public surveys on scientific literacy and attitudes towards science and technology conducted in 1989 and 1992, and to outline a research (and, in some respects, funding) agenda for the scholarly field. The presence of leading scholars and high-ranking European politicians lent an air of import to the proceedings, which was at its weightiest during the political speech-making on the final day. While they’re seemed to be vast divides between the proverbial qualitative and quantitative methodologists as well as a rather profound lack of understanding of the express purposes of surveys as the EUROBAROMETER, there promises to emerge a degree of consensus in the results of the conference, which will be reported by the WZB in the form of a book, a web site and the final memorandum to be drafted for the Commission. Public understanding researchers of all stripes eagerly await their appearance.
The EUROBAROMETER, inspired by similar scientific literacy and attitudinal studies conducted over the past couple of decades in the United States, has become practically synonymous with its most notorious question: “Does the earth go around the sun or the sun around the earth?” This and a battery of true or false questions, as “all radioactivity is man-made” and “the oxygen we breathe comes from plants”, are meant to measure national EU citizens’ knowledge of scientific fact. A basic knowledge of scientific fact and conventional scientific method, which is also measured, are supposedly essential for a community citizen’s ability to understand science and technology. Such an understanding, it was argued in Berlin, helps people to read newspaper articles on scientific controversies as well as to participate as democratic citizens in debate and decision-making on the subjects. The notion that Europeans, generally, or certain national citizenries, as the Portugese or Greeks, have lesser understandings of scientific fact and method than other nationals, a result arguably designed into and certainly confirmed by the surveys, has come to be known as the ‘deficit model’, which most everyone agreed is not semantically correct. In any case, the literacy surveys, as was noted in the presentations, measure educational uptake — a sort of level of high school book-learning — and do not measure, among other things, when or the extent to which this knowledge is relevant in various social settings and situations. There was some agreement, expressed in the call for “methodological pluralism”, that the analyses should be augmented by contextual research, more regional, open-ended and finely grained in character.
The surveys, which gather basic demographic information and pose questions about people’s interest in and sources of knowledge and information about science and technology (i.e., traditionally, through activities as media consumption and library and museum visitation), also guage the respondents’ attitudes towards science and technology in general and practical terms, their sense of the status of European research as compared to that of the U.S. and Japan, and their awareness of EU-sponsored research and research policy. The relationship between knowledge and attitude constituted the key finding, which has been known or surmised for some time. Contrary to the expectations of the surveyers and perhaps many others besides, a higher level of knowledge of science, as construed by the survey, does not lead to fewer reservations about science. Put differently, the more you know, the worse your attitude, which, as was also mentioned, has much in common with Ulrich Beck’s notion of the self-refutation of modernity. But there were abberations, as in the comparison between Danes and Germans, and much is being made of the fact that in certain cases the Danes, again in aggregate terms, are both knowledgable and optimistic, while the Germans are knowledgable and pessimistic.
This relates to what the surveyers call the “industrialisation paradox”. While, as the researchers maintained in the presentations, the EUROBAROMETER instrument is not meant to rank nations, it nevertheless does indicate an hierarchic disparity in national citizenries’ attitudes towards the promise of science and technology, depending on their country’s “level of industrialisation”. Thus the citizenries of “developing EU countries” (defined as Greece and Portugal) view science and technology as the way forward but are pessimistic about their ability to solve social problems, the “established industrialised countries” (Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands) generally do not believe in science as progress but readily assimilate the fruits into everyday life, while, finally, the “advanced industrialised countries” (Denmark and Germany), as mentioned above, both share a belief in progress but are split on the costs of assimilation. On an even more general plane, further presentations compared interest, knowledge and attitudes at work in Europe, Canada, Japan and the USA, where the most notable finding concerned a relative lack of interest on the part of the Japanese in new scientific, technological and medical inventions and discoveries.
Many of these European survey findings have been reported before, as at the ‘94 EASST conference in Budapest, and the approach and the findings have been subject to critical examination. The meeting, as discussed especially in the informal encounters, was more about whether room would be made in the Commission funding schemes for different approaches to the study of public understanding. While the final day seemed to witness the attrition of alternate approaches to the EUROBAROMETER, other agendas were drawn up in working groups and duly reported earlier. Here mention is made only of the results of the group dedicated to ‘mapping the knowledge on public understanding’, with special reference to ‘forgotten aspects’.
Addressing the social and policy-making purposes of the research, members of the group made a plea for attention to be paid to the contexts of use of the research. Instead of merely evaluating survey barometers methodologically or “internally”, enquires should be made into how the survey findings are interpreted, by whom and to which ends. So in contrast to running after the actors, the idea is to follow the results in national and European policy arenas, especially in educational policy. The same demand should be made of qualitative research findings. The key question, affirmative answers to which were provided in some of the presentations, is whether the research construction of the bearers of scientific knowledge reproduces painful stereotypes and merely legitimates science policy. More fundamentally, “understanding” may refer not only to the ability to demonstrate “cognitive performance”, i.e., to get the test questions right, but also to the capacity to use and interpret scientific knowledge in situations closer to home or, as it was put, in one’s “world of relevance”. The recommendation related to further social epistemological research, where, if need be, definitions of knowledge as well as understandings of science and technology emerge at the outset of the study from the users. There remains a need, however, for symmetrical treatment of the value of the experts’ and the publics’ knowledges, which, as a participant remarked, means not (normatively) granting the public some superior capacity to generate truth.
Trust was a much-discussed topic, given the survey finding that trust in public institutions continues to wane, while that in consumer organisations and other NGOs waxes. Turning the arrow from knowledge to trust around, research should concentrate on the extent to which mistrust could just as logically be a product of scientific capability, unrelated to formal learning.
Finally, the idea was put forward that exposing people to the sorts of qualitative public understanding research advocated could be a way of promoting personal engagement in scientific deconstruction and reflexivity. As is freely admitted, science and technology studies is hardly the only arena in which wide-spread deconstruction of science and regulation occurs. It may even be described as a normal feature of public scientific controversy, where vested interests are regularly exposed, especially in the USA. Perhaps the point of such research engagement is to improve the style of public debate and reconciliation of scientific controversy, and certain models, as Danish, Dutch and British “consensus conferences”, are under consideration.
In conclusion, it seems that the old “noble” aims of raising the public awareness in science have gone the way of modernity, leaving some researchers with the tools and the findings but not the rationale. Nevertheless it appears the surveys will continue to be conducted, their social value debated and their purposes reinvented. One might even be tempted to call them fun, but at whose expense no one’s quite sure yet.
NOTES
Italians scored highest on this question, while the British were at the bottom of the heap.
European Commission, Europeans, Science and Technology - Public Understandings and Attitudes, DG XII, EUR 15461, June, 1993, p. 19. The standard Eurobarometer 38.1 field questionnaire is found on pages 123-133. A conference paper on the subject was presented by John Durant and Martin Bauer.
These and other comparative results were presented by Rafael Pardo and Jon Miller.
Cf. Wynne, B., “Public Understanding of Science”, in S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Petersen, and T. Pinch (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Sage, London, 1995, pp. 365-370.
The group, chaired by Brian Wynne, heard contributions by Sheila Jasanoff, Steven Yearley, Boudouin Jurdant, Knut Sorensen, Ulrike Felt, Aren Mortensen and Alexandros Kyrtsis.
See Joss, S. and J. Durant (eds.), Public Participation in Science: The Role of Consensus Conferences in Europe, Science Museum, London, 1995.