Over the past decade, several influential papers examining the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes toward science have been published. The 1992 Eurobarometer has been the preferred source of data for analysis, and a number of suggestive conclusions regarding the extent and nature of the links between knowledge and attitudes have been proposed. Summated scales were built through principal component analysis of the attitudinal items and reliability analysis, but little attention has been paid to the content of the attitudinal items and to the metric and conceptual weaknesses of the scales. A more parsimonious revision of the data, carried out here, shows that the measures used are fuzzy and, as a consequence, the empirical support for some published results is very limited. We suggest that more theoretical effort should be devoted to the design of questionnaires and to the combined use of statistical exploratory techniques and qualitative analysis in the interpretation of the data.
The cognitive dimension of public perceptions of science is a central component of the interdisciplinary field devoted to their study. The subset of this dimension that has received the most attention is the one known as scientific literacy (SL), and particularly scientific knowledge of the "knowwhat" type. People's appropriation of scientific theories of the world and also of the inner workings of scientific practice is of interest in itself and also for its role in explaining-in interaction with other variables-public attitudes toward science. Despite its significance, the understanding of science has received progressively less attention since the late 1990s. This paper reviews the substantive characteristics and formal properties of the scale of SL most widely used in the literature, which has been constructed on the basis of Eurobarometer measurements. It considers a number of steps, such as content, item analysis, and differential reliability, both for the total sample and for different nations and social groups, that are usually omitted in the literature. This new analysis shows that the standard SL test barely achieves satisfactory metric properties and that although it captures major (but not fine-grained) differences in SL by nation and sociodemographic groups, it is in need of significant theoretical and formal improvements. Our analysis also shows that a well-known thesis in the literature, the so-called "knowledgeignorance paradox," rests on a statistical misinterpretation of the data. The evolutionary path of public understanding of scienceThe "public understanding of science" (PUS) field is currently a loose grouping of researchers from a broad spectrum of academic backgrounds, each with its own theoretical and methodological traditions, addressing a wide array of formal objects and practical concerns. This research area, then, is neither an academic discipline nor in possession of a single paradigm (Durant, 1992). Its various strands of research remain at a low level of theoretical development. One of its strongest foundations-the scientific literacy traditionhas lost momentum in recent years but has not been replaced by a more potent theoretical, formal, and methodological program able to impose discipline on research and bring investigative efforts into convergence. On the contrary, the sidelining of the scientific literacy tradition has left such a plethora of divergent approaches dealing with such distantly connected objects and issues, that it precludes talk of any shared theoretical underpinning, much less one that could significantly influence researchers' original disciplines. The reverse SAGE PUBLICATIONS (www.sagepublications.com)
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