Leading academic institutions, governments, and funders of research across the world have spent the last few decades fretting publicly about the need for scientists and research organisations to engage more widely with the public and be open about their research. While a global literature asserts that public communication has changed from a virtue to a duty for scientists in many countries and disciplines, our knowledge about what research institutions are doing and what factors drive their 'going public' is very limited. Here we present the first cross-national study of N = 2,030 research institutes within universities and large scientific organisations in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We find that institutes embrace communication with non-peers and do so through a variety of public events and traditional news media-less so through new media channels-and we find variation across countries and sciences, yet these are less evident than we expected. Country and disciplinary cultures contribute to the level of this communication, as do the resources that institutes make available for the effort; institutes with professionalised staff show higher activity online. Future research should examine whether a real change in the organisational culture is happening or whether this activity and resource allocation is merely a means to increase institutional visibility.
Since its very beginning, modern science has put images at the center of its communicative processes: drawings, diagrams, and schemes, and later photographs, satellite images, and film. In the age of digital communication, specialists and publics live constantly immersed in a visually dense environment, particularly when it comes to science and technology content. Do we have the competence to decipher all these images, often complex and elaborate? If the so-called science literacy has become a standard dimension of public understanding of science at the international level, much less studied so far is visual science literacy. We tested empirical indicators of visual science literacy in the context of three surveys (2014, 2015, and 2016) of public perception in Italy on a representative sample of the population. The results show that respondents fare generally better in recognizing images related to science than in responding to textual questions. Images could offer relevant opportunities for greater public engagement with scientific results.
Objectives: Vaccination campaigns against COVID-19 throughout the world are not only a major organisational challenge, but also a communication and social challenge. Recent data from several countries show that a relevant proportion of citizens either do not plan to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or would rather postpone their vaccination. We argue that such attitudes are not the result of generalised scepticism about vaccination, nor of generalised distrust in science.Methods: We analysed data from three survey waves on attitudes to vaccination against COVID-19 conducted in Italy in October 2020, January 2021, and May 2021 in the context of the Science in Society Monitor.Results: Positive evaluations of experts’ communication and trust in their contribution—as well as in that of health institutions, local authorities, and healthcare workers—play a key role in understanding the willingness to be vaccinated.Conclusion: Relevant implications can be drawn in terms of communication efforts and institutional strategies that are essential to build effective and inclusive vaccination campaigns.
With this paper our goal is to formalize the main differences between the applications of ethnographic techniques when they are framed in Virtual or Digital Methods. To be more systematic in presenting these differences, a synoptic table is offered. This table examines the main breaking points between the methods and is used to organize a marked comparison between two tourism studies chosen as being representative; one for the ethnographic application of Virtual Methods, and one for the ethnographic application of Digital Methods. In addition to testing the effectiveness of the proposed classification scheme, the purpose of the comparison conducted between the two tourism studies is to highlight where the changes that have occurred can lead to advances in the method and where these changes have become new limits on which it is necessary to continue to reflect in order to develop the methods involved and place them clearly in line with the evolution of the digital scenario. Keywords: Virtual Methods, Digital Methods, Netnography, Digital Ethnography, Tourism Studies.
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