What can we learn from 25 years of PUS survey research? Liberating and expanding the agenda

TLDR

Naming matters as a marker of tribal identity, and each paradigm frames the problem differently—posing characteristic questions, preferred solutions, and a rhetoric of progress—while the authors anticipate a fertile period for survey research on public understanding of science under varying presumptions. The paper reviews key issues of public understanding of science research over 25 years, traces how discussion has shifted through three paradigms—science literacy, public understanding of science, and science and society—and argues that severing the fallacious link between survey protocols and the deficit model will liberate and expand the agenda in four directions: contextualizing research, seeking cultural indicators, integrating datasets with longitudinal analysis, and incorporating other data streams. The authors analyze large‑scale survey research by tracing its evolution across the three paradigms and propose severing the link between survey protocols and the deficit model to expand the agenda. The authors find that the polemic over the deficit concept, while.

Abstract

This paper reviews key issues of public understanding of science (PUS) research over the last quarter of a century. We show how the discussion has moved in relation to large-scale surveys of public perceptions by tracing developments through three paradigms: science literacy, public understanding of science and science and society. Naming matters here like elsewhere as a marker of “tribal identity.” Each paradigm frames the problem differently, poses characteristic questions, offers preferred solutions, and displays a rhetoric of “progress” over the previous one. We argue that the polemic over the “deficit concept” voiced a valid critique of a common sense concept among experts, but confused the issue with methodological protocol. PUS research has been hampered by this “essentialist” association between the survey research protocol and the public deficit model. We argue that this fallacious link should be severed to liberate and to expand the research agenda in four directions: contextualizing survey research, searching for cultural indicators, integrating datasets and doing longitudinal analysis, and including other data streams. Under different presumptions, assumed and granted, we anticipate a fertile period for survey research on public understanding of science.