Archives des mots-clés : Science communication

A step by step approach for science communication…

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A step-by-step approach for science communication practitioners: a design perspective :

“Science communication processes are complex and uncertain. Designing and managing these processes using a step-by-step approach, allows those with science communication responsibility to manoeuvre between moral or normative issues, practical experiences, empirical data and theoretical foundations. The tool described in this study is an evidence-based questionnaire, tested in practice for feasibility. The key element of this decision aid is a challenge to the science communication practitioners to reflect on their attitudes, knowledge, reasoning and decision-making in a step-by-step manner to question the aim, function and impact of each issue and attendant communication process or strategy. This approach eventually leads to more professional science communication processes by systematic design. The Design-Based Research (DBR) derived from science education and applied in this study, may form a new methodology for further exploration of the gap between theory and practice in science communication and. Practitioners, scholars, and researchers all participate actively in DBR.”

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/11/02/Jcom1102%282012%29A03

Scientists’ attitudes toward a dialogue with the public…

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Scientists’ attitudes toward a dialogue with the public: a study using “science cafes” :

“Currently, science is developing rapidly and its influence on society is more significant than ever. This is all the more reason for today’s scientists to interact with the general public. To design effective science communication activities, we must understand scientists’ motivations and barriers to publicly communicating science. In this study, we interviewed 19 early-career scientists who had participated in science cafes in Japan. From these interviews, we identified five factors leading to their reluctance to participate in science cafes: 1) troublesome or time-consuming; 2) pressure to be an appropriate science representative; 3) outside the scope of their work; 4) could not perceive any benefit; and 5) apprehension about dialogue with the public. Among these factors, apprehension about dialogue may be the clearest reflection of the scientists’ underlying feelings about this form of communication and an indicator of more intrinsic barriers to engaging in science cafes.”

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/10/04/Jcom1004%282011%29A02

Coming of age in the academy? The status of our emerging field

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Science communication is certainly growing as an academic field, as well as a professional specialization. This calls to mind predictions made decades ago about the ways in which the explosion of scientific knowledge was envisioned as the likely source of new difficulties in the relationship between science and society.

It is largely this challenge that has inspired the creation of the field of science communication. Has science communication become its own academic subdiscipline in the process? What exactly does this entail?

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C06/Jcom0903%282010%29C06.pdf

Is science communication its own field? …

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Is science communication its own field? :

The present comment examines to what extent science communication has attained the status of an academic discipline and a distinct research field, as opposed to the common view that science communication is merely a sub-discipline of media studies, sociology of science or history of science. Against this background, the authors of this comment chart the progress science
communication has made as an emerging subject over the last 50 years in terms of a number of
measures. Although discussions are still ongoing about the elements that must be present to
constitute a legitimate disciplinary field, we show here that science communication meets four key
elements that constitute an analytical framework to classify academic disciplines: the presence of
a community; a history of inquiry; a mode of inquiry that defines how data is collected; and the
existence of a communications network.”

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C04/Jcom0903%282010%29C04.pdf

Science communication, an emerging discipline

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Several publications have sought to define the field of science communication and review current issues and recent research. But the status of science communication is uncertain in disciplinary terms.

This commentary considers two dimensions of the status of discipline as they apply to science communication – the clarity with which the field is defined and the level of development of theories to guide formal studies.

It argues that further theoretical development is needed to support science communication’s full emergence as a discipline.

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C03/Jcom0903%282010%29C03.pdf