23: Public Understanding of Science
Interview with Dr. Edna F. Einsiedel, Editor, April 2008
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This installment of our program is about the quarterly journal Public Understanding of Science. Published by Sage, a leading publisher of academic journals, Public Understanding of Science covers topics including:
To learn about the journal and the topics it covers, my guest is Dr. Edna Einsiedel, University Professor and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Dr. Einsiedel has edited the journal since 2004. Her many publications include her co-edited book Crossing over: genomics in the public arena.
Steve: Dr. Einsiedel, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Dr. Einsiedel: Thank you.
Steve: I gather from browsing through Public Understanding of Science that “understanding” encompasses both knowledge and attitudes. Could you describe for us some of the issues involved in the interplay between knowledge of scientific and attitudes towards science?
Dr. Einsiedel: Well, that’s a good question, and that is one of the key issues in the field of, if you could call it a field, the field of public understanding of science. I think there has been a dominant assumption, which probably is still in place today, that publics are often misinformed about science, and all we need to do is provide information or educate these publics. Once they know, they’ll come around, or they’ll accept whatever it is you’re promoting, whether it’s new technology or some scientific idea. This is called the “deficit model” of public understanding of science. That model has been pretty much discredited, to a large degree. It’s true that under certain conditions, in some circumstances, publics are misinformed, but you actually have a range in terms of when you’re talking about knowledge, there is a continuum there. Some publics are more expert on some things than others. We know that this notion about understanding is not something that is fixed, and that publics interact with science or science topics in many different ways. Now, if you’re talking about the connection between knowledge and attitudes, that assumption that the more publics know, the more they’ll be supportive has been discredited, pretty much. There is some evidence that knowledge has some connection with attitudes, but it’s not a very strong relationship. There are so many other factors that come into play. In fact, there is evidence that in some instances, depending on the topic, you have people who are very knowledgeable who may reject the idea that is being promoted.
Steve: You’re using the term “publics,” plural.
Dr. Einsiedel: Yes.
Steve: I gather from reading the journal some that it’s well established that the public is not some homogenous whole. Can you describe for us why the term “publics” is used, and the concepts behind that and the importance of that?
Dr. Einsiedel: Right, there are many different publics, in many different contexts. Depending on the issue, what may be a public for one issue may not be the same public for a different issue. So I think there’s a greater understanding that the public is not one whole, or homogenous whole. In terms of degrees of knowledge, just as an example you have publics who are more active than others. I’ll use the example of patient organizations. They have expertise on their condition or their disease, and that expertise allows them to interact with scientists on a level that may not be true for other types of publics. So depending the context and the nature of the group you’re talking about, you will have different publics for different issues at different times.
Steve: In a recent editorial, you wrote that the field labeled “public understanding of science” has, I’m quoting, “for some time felt the oppressive burden of a label that has been outgrown.” Can you describe for us what you mean?
Dr. Einsiedel: Well, what I mean is that we have moved away from this old notion of a deficit model of publics, and clarified our understanding of different publics, what the term “understanding” means, and basically what science means. Science also as an object is not a homogenous object. I mean, under different conditions you may have publics talking about a different kind of science for different issues. For example, let’s take the issue of climate change. The science in that context may be very differently viewed than the science in a different context. Take some other issue like BSE [Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or mad cow disease] as an example. So the notion of public understanding of science has been reflected on and questioned and I think our understanding of what that phenomenon means has changed over time. Each of those words mean different things today.
Steve: If you could wave a magic wand, do you have a term in mind you would use in its place?
Dr. Einsiedel: That’s a good question. We had actually thought about changing the name of the journal, except that it has enough of a history that we thought perhaps changing the name might be more problematic than the problem we’re trying to solve. We simply thought of “Publics and Science” as an alternative name for the journal.
Steve: Okay, so that would be more descriptive of what it’s really about?
Dr. Einsiedel: It’s broader, it’s more descriptive. Well, it’s broader. I don’t know that it’s necessarily more descriptive in the sense that it doesn’t talk about understanding, but it incorporates enough of a range of arenas, if you will, in terms of the kind of issues the journal is interested in. For example, one of the areas that you will find covered in the journal is the media, and how representations of science occur in the mass media. So you have on a range of topics like climate change, like BSE, like genetically modified foods, that’s another common example, you will find studies on media representations of science. Now why is that important in the context of publics and their understandings of science? Well, the media is certainly one very important conduit for people getting information about science, and in those instances where they don’t have personal experience with the issue, the media then becomes a more important forum for learning about a topic.
Steve: If you were in charge of a Best Media Presentation of Science award, who would be on your short list?
Dr. Einsiedel: Ah, that’s a good one. I would naturally think mainly of Canadian science journalists, but in the U.S. you have really excellent science journalists like Rick Weiss from the Washington Post, some of the reporters for the New York Times are some of the best writers. So there are quite a number of people, I would say, who do justice to science issues and topics.
Steve: It’s interesting to me that you’re choosing individual writers, as opposed to public broadcasting, or one of the networks or whatever.
Dr. Einsiedel: Well, it’s difficult to choose a network because they will have a range of folks. For example, in a given network you will have a medical reporter, you will have an environmental reporter, occasionally. But some networks do a better job than others, and depending on the issue again, you won’t necessarily find consistently very good performance across the board. But I’d have to say I like the reporters who work for the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Steve: Very good. I noticed that one of the issues covered in the journal Public Understanding of Science is actions by the public that actually benefit and advance scientific inquiry. Could you give us a few examples of things members of the public have done to advance science?
Dr. Einsiedel: To advance science?
Steve: To help science, to support scientific work.
Dr. Einsiedel: Hmm, that’s a good one, only because I’ve recently been looking at the role of patient organizations in contributing to the scientific enterprise. I’ll use as one example a group that has not just advanced science, but made science look different, if I can put it that way. I’ll give the example of AIDS organizations, or AIDS patients who were very involved in political activism in getting that illness on the public agenda, and also changing the way science is done in terms of how some patient groups collaborated with scientists in doing things like getting patients involved in clinical trials, in getting procedures around clinical trials changed so that science could proceed faster, for example. Patient organizations have been very active in collaborating with scientists, so that some attention is paid to the disease of interest. There are some genetic diseases, for example, that are considered orphan diseases because there are very few who are affected by those illnesses. But what they have done is they’ve gotten together as an alliance and then started collaborating with sympathetic scientists. They changed the way science is done in terms of not just paying more attention to these illnesses, but also contributing to the way science is funded. I’m sure you’re familiar with a lot of the fundraising exercises that various cancer groups, various patient activist groups have done.
Steve: Oh, yes.
Dr. Einsiedel: They’re not just raising money for science, they’re actually collaborating in the process of deciding what sorts of research might get funded. I mean, if you think about an issue like stem cell research, you have particular groups that have been quite active in trying to change policy direction on that issue. That’s true in the U.S., it’s true in Canada. You have some patient organizations that would like to see, for example, more research on human embryonic stem cells. But you know that there’s a lot of controversy around doing that kind of work, and so many patient groups that are interested in getting that sort of research funded have tried to find other ways of getting the work done despite the maybe not so friendly policy environment.
Steve: Well thank you, those were very instructive examples. Thanks. I would expect your authors come from many academic disciplines. What are some of the disciplines represented within the pages of Public Understanding of Science?
Dr. Einsiedel: Well, there are two areas which keep track of the impact factor of the journal. One is called the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. The second is Communications. But I would say that the journal actually intersects with a lot of other areas, like Science and Technology Studies, it also has connections with Health Education, it also has connections with Science Communication. So I guess it’s a very interdisciplinary journal that way.
Steve: So you receive submissions from . . ..
Dr. Einsiedel: From a wide range of areas. We have submissions from people in medicine, we have submissions from people in communications, obviously, but also from philosophers. So it’s quite a wide range, including historians of science.
Steve: Given that wide range, do you ever have difficulty finding qualified peer reviewers for the papers that come in?
Dr. Einsiedel: I think that’s a general problem with a lot of journals. There are many more journals in a given interest area, so there’s competition there, and there’s competition too in terms of reviewers. That’s always a challenge. The fact that with interdisciplinary journals, I think that challenge is magnified even more.
Steve: So what special efforts do you have to make to recruit the peer reviewers? Is that one of the major challenges of your job?
Dr. Einsiedel: That is one of the major challenges. We have a fairly large database that we try to rely on. We use a rule, try a use a rule, anyway, of not using the same reviewer more than once a year. Sometimes it’s difficult to do that. Replenishing or increasing this database obviously is one of the ways we try to maintain currency in terms of the range of expertise that people who have particular expertise in many different fields that relate to the journal.
Steve: And that database is something you do in conjunction with Sage, your publisher, is that correct?
Dr. Einsiedel: Yes.
Steve: Let me change the topic just a little bit now. I recently participated in a colloquium here on my campus about problem-based inquiry. A science professor mentioned during the discussion that students are often surprised, perhaps even shocked, to find out how much uncertainty there is in the scientific process. They tend to think that science comes up with truth with a capital T. Is it a common misperception that science provides truth with a capital T?
Dr. Einsiedel: That’s a common misperception, but I would also say that’s one of the things that has been changing in the field of public understanding of science. When I talked about this notion of science as a concept, and how it has been changing, and how it’s been interrogated and analyzed, one of the things is the issue of where certainty and uncertainty place into the doing of science. I think for a long time we’ve relied on the expertise, on the unquestioned expertise of science, and one of the factors in that reliance has been the fact we did not think too much about the uncertainties that are embedded in many scientific topics or findings. In the last several decades we have seen where these uncertainties have emerged and essentially portrayed a science that is incomplete sometimes, that is not all-knowing, and whose authority gets challenged, as well. One of these challenges has to do with how certainty and uncertainty is considered in outcomes. So I think that’s one of the things that have changed about our views of the scientific enterprise.
Steve: And improved on the whole?
Dr. Einsiedel: Improved on the whole. I think there is improvement on both sides. That is, in the public domain you do find some scientists tend to be more careful about how they explain their findings. At the same time, it becomes an issue particularly with media coverage of scientific findings where the tendency is to suggest that these findings are more true than they actually are. That is, not accounting for the uncertainties that may be embedded in the findings.
Steve: Those uncertainties are usually well described in the actual published articles, which leads me to something I wanted to discuss a little bit. A hot topic in scholarly publishing and librarianship is Open Access, the model where journals are made freely available to everyone without having to pay a subscription price. From your perspective, is Open Access a good idea?
Dr. Einsiedel: I think it’s a very good idea. One of the issues that we are running into is the issue of access, particularly from developing countries. In many instances with a journal that has a commercial publisher like Public Understanding of Science, that kind of access is not easy to come by. Now one of the things that Sage does is it tries to provide some kind of access to institutions in countries that are unable to financially support these kinds of subscriptions. That’s one way of addressing the issue. Then you of course have journals that are published under the basis of an Open Access system, and I’m all for that, as well. I think there’s room for both types of enterprises.
Steve: My library just recently got access to Public Understanding of Science through the Sage Online package. In the past, the way they priced the package made it unaffordable for us. But Sage recently, within the last year or so, changed their business model to make it much more affordable for smaller colleges like the College of Saint Rose. Otherwise we really couldn’t justify paying the full subscription for a journal such as yours, because it gets relatively little use.
Dr. Einsiedel: Right.
Steve: Have you seen an impact on your readership or submissions with the fairly recent change in the Sage Online business model?
Dr. Einsiedel: Well, one of the elements in this new strategy that they have employed is that they actually run a free trial month, I believe that’s the period of time. So this last year in February and I believe in October or November they opened up the journals to users, so you could try out the journal for a period of time. The statistics in terms of usage are really incredible right during those two months, and you can track the difference between those months and other months of the year. That has also made a difference in terms of interest in the journal, in terms of usage, and I’m all for repeating that trial experiment every year. There should be a window within which you can access journal content.
Steve: Have you seen an impact on the submissions from that?
Dr. Einsiedel: We’ve actually just gone online this past year, and it’s typically the case when you go online you see a spike in the submissions, and we’ve seen that. The trick is to then maintain that kind of submission rate over a longer period of time. But certainly the online submission process has made it easier for both reviewers and authors.
Steve: Dr. Einsiedel, you’re a professor of communication studies. What drew you to inquiry into the public understanding of science?
Dr. Einsiedel: What led me to my interest?
Steve: Yes, and from a background in communication studies, how did that lead you to this?
Dr. Einsiedel: Right. I actually have an undergraduate degree in zoology, and my next short career was to do a bit of science journalism. I did a double major as an undergraduate in zoology and journalism. So I’ve always been interested in that combination, if you will. I went to the U.S. to do my Ph.D., and that is where I started working on the communications end, but I’ve always kept this interest in science, and in the early 1990’s we started collaborating with researchers in the U.S. and in the U.K. to look at issues around science literacy. That’s how I ended up in this field.
Steve: You became editor of the journal in 2004. Are you enjoying it?
Dr. Einsiedel: I’m enjoying it, although my term may be coming to an end this year. I have just too many things on my plate. But I’ve accomplished a couple of things I was hoping to do, which was to bring the journal into the online world in terms of the submission and review process, and also to increase the impact factor of the journal.
Steve: Excellent. Dr. Einsiedel, thank you very much for being my guest on Periodical Radio.
Dr. Einsiedel: I appreciate it.
Steve: Have a very nice day.
Dr. Einsiedel: Thank you.
Steve: Public Understanding of Science is available to subscribers at http://pus.sagepub.com/. Individual subscriptions are $83/year. Thank you for listening to this installment of Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.