Jensen, E. A. (2020). Re-examining research on motivations and perspectives of scientists relating to public engagement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 117 (20). 10628. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2000633117
Rose et al. make a valuable contribution to the literature on scientists’ engagement with publics. Here, I highlight two issues that may help clarify the precise nature of this contribution.
First, we should consider whether sampling only tenure-track or tenured faculty in physical, biological, and social sciences in US land-grant universities (of which 27 were excluded) gives a representative picture of scientists’ attitudes. For example, no rationale is provided for excluding scientists on more precarious nonpermanent work contracts, even though such contracts are widespread in the United States, and may come with different incentives for and attitudes toward public communication of science.
Second, there is a limitation in how claims about statistically significant differences are communicated. It is easy to find statistically significant differences with large sample sizes like this. Therefore, researchers must apply judgment in evaluating whether such differences tell us something meaningful in order to “convey the most complete meaning of the results”. For example, the article reports gender differences in levels of agreement with the five objectives for public communication tested in the study: “Female scientists were consistently more supportive of each objective than their male colleagues, except for persuasion.” However, the effect size for this finding is limited, for example, only R2 = 0.2% on the “informing” objective. This means that, if you know only the respondents’ gender, you could accurately predict just one-fifth of 1% of the variance in agreement with the informing objective for public science communication.
