Steve Miller reflects on the BA Science Communication Conference
 
One of the key challenges facing science communication today is to understand the relationship between those who carry out practical activities in citizen engagement, and researchers in the field known variously as public understanding of science, science in/and society, and so on.
Clearly the British Association for the Advancement of Science sees this as an important issue. In his opening address to the recent Science Communication Conference, the BA’s Chief Executive Roland Jackson set out seven challenges for the assembled delegates. Jackson’s plea – in Challenge Number Six – was to bring practitioners and researchers to some level of understanding: for practitioners to understand what was relevant in the research; for researchers to pay more attention to the practice and why it is as it is.
How, then, are we to understand the speech given to the same conference by Professor Steve Rayner, who leads the Economic and Social Research Council’s Science in Society programme?

Questioning communication
In his talk, Professor Rayner identified three stages in the recent relations between science and ordinary citizens, at least as they were seen by the scientific and science communication communities. These three stages were each associated with a perceived deficit: a deficit of knowledge, a deficit of appreciation, and a deficit of trust. In each case, Professor Rayner claimed, the scientific community and other powers-that-be proposed that the solution was a communication strategy; and in each case, according to Professor Rayner, the communication strategies ‘failed’. So, he concluded, communication could not be the answer.
So what, then, for science communication? Given Challenge Number Six, how does any of the academic research carried out under the auspices of the ESRC relate to or inform science communication? Does it have a future, or should those involved in public engagement and information pack up their bags?
The conference was not provided with an answer. Perhaps Professor Rayner had identified a fourth deficit – the deficit of social science knowledge among science communicators – and had decided that any communication strategy between his social science research colleagues and the practitioner community was also doomed to fail. If so, this is a rather bleak outlook for Roland Jackson’s Challenge Number Six.
But does it have to be like that?

Research can inform practice
For a start, many of those attending the conference – presumably people who define themselves as having something to do with science communication – already show a clear interest in more theoretical aspects of the area. Of 125 attenders who were surveyed, 45 per cent said that they read one or both of the main academic journals Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication, at least occasionally. Including the BA’s own policy-orientated publication Science & Public Affairs brought the journal readership up to 58 per cent. So Jackson’s Challenge Number Six should fall on fairly fertile ground. Why, then, drive a wedge between the ‘thinkers’ and the ‘doers’ in this rather unhelpful way?
In a recent paper in the journal Public Understanding of Science, Martin Bauer, Nick Allum and I looked briefly at the history of research in the science and society field.1 We, like Professor Rayner, identified three stages and the accompanying perceived ‘deficits’ and the strategies designed to overcome them. And we had our criticisms of all of them.
But that did not lead us to a counsel of despair. Instead, we argued that opening up the agenda to combine quantitative research, such as the regular Eurobarometer surveys, with qualitative indicators, could help to identify the cultural climate for science and associated communication activities.
For example, science communicators planning a major science festival or other event could make use of the survey data to pick up on changing attitudes towards various branches of science, as well as getting an idea of the extent to which scientific concepts have penetrated into general culture. There is a whole spectrum of social science techniques – from the large-scale surveys to small focus groups, from overall media monitoring to detailed content analysis – that can inform practical activities.
So we concluded that there are now real opportunities in science and society/science communication to move the research agenda forward in ways that are relevant to, and
 
Thinkers and doers: research on the gorillas at Paignton Zoo enabled the zoo to communicate better with visitors Paignton Zoo
benefit, those involved in practical public engagement. Let’s take them!

1. Martin W. Bauer, Nick Allum and Steve Miller, 2007. What can we learn from 25 years of PUS survey research? Liberating and expanding the agenda. Public Understanding of Science 16, 79-95

Steve Miller is Professor of Science Communication and Planetary Science, and Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies, at University College London