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The CNS-ASU Program RTTA 2: Public Opinion and Values Leaders: Dietram Scheufele, University of Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Corley, ASU GoalsThe overall goals of RTTA 2 are to monitor, among both the public and scientists, the understanding of and values relating to nanoscale science and engineering (NSE) and its potential societal outcomes, track these variables over time, and examine the role of the media in reflecting and influencing them. RTTA 2 comprises a set of inter-related research themes around the public, NSE researchers and the media.
RTTA 2/1 Public Opinion PollingRTTA 2/1 completed its full-scale public opinion survey in July 2007. The survey was a CATI survey with a combined RDD and listed household sample conducted May - July 2007 (N=1015; AAPOR RR-3 30.6%; margin of error, +/- 3%). Questions were specifically designed or chosen to enable comparisons with a 2004 U.S. nanotechnology survey as a baseline and the 2006 Eurobarometer for international comparative data. (The 2008 pre- and post-test surveys for the RTTA 3/4 National Citizens' Technology Forum were crafted to correspond as well.) The survey's content included questions about communication and information environment, strategies for processing scientific information, attitudes and values, nano literacy, perceptions of scientists, policy makers and the need for regulation, and perceptions of the risks and benefits and future developments of nanotechnologies. Scheufele and Corley worked with CNS-ASU doctoral students to examine individual-level relationships in the United States between religiosity and agreement with the idea that "nanotechnology is morally acceptable." They found a significant negative correlation between religiosity and agreement that nanotechnology is morally acceptable, and this relationship held even after potential mediators of the link between religious beliefs and attitudes toward nanotechnology - such as trust in scientists, knowledge about nanotechnology, or attention to science content in various media - were included as control variables. Scheufele and Corley further explored whether this relationship was typical of western countries by comparing their U.S. public opinion data results with Eurobarometer public opinions surveys. Respondents in the United States were significantly less likely to agree that "nanotechnology is morally acceptable" than respondents in many European countries. Furthermore, at the country level, Scheufele and Corley observed a negative relationship between aggregate levels of religiosity (that is, the overall religious climate) in each country and aggregate beliefs that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. These country-level analyses corroborate the link between religiosity and attitudes towards nanotechnology that Scheufele and Corley found in the individual-level U.S. data. Furthermore, these results suggest that the religious climates in each country may play an important role in predicting levels of support for nanotechnology. Scheufele and Corley published the results of this analysis with several CNS-ASU graduate students (Scheufele et al. 2009). Early in Year 5 of the project, RTTA 2/1 will field its second large-scale national survey. It will be akin in size to the first survey and return to questions that highlight longitudinal and comparative opportunities - particularly as they relate to public information about nanotechnology, support for regulatory scenarios, and market dynamics. RTTA 2/2 Media InfluenceRTTA 2/2 has conducted a variety of analyses of nanotechnologies in the media, including tracking over time broad themes of nano coverage and analyzing those themes across different strata of newspapers. Results will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. RTTA 2/2 currently also is in the process of fielding the first of two large-scale experiments assessing media influence and attitude formation on nanotechnology. These experiments will deal with nano cleaners and the links between visual presentation of data and information processing about nanotechnology. The projects to-date involve three faculty (Dunwoody, Brossard, and Scheufele) and eight University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students. RTTA 2/3 Scientists' OpinionsRTTA 2/3 completed its mail survey of the leading U.S. nano-scientists in June 2007. The sampling design was based on identifying the first authors and contact authors for the most highly cited, recent NSE publications indexed in the ISI Web of Knowledge database, refined by Porter et al's (2008) search terms. To develop the final sample for the scientist survey, RTTA 1 researchers delivered a database of 91,479 nanotechnology publications published between January 2005 and July 2006. The final filtering process produced 1,022 names and this yielded 363 completed questionnaires, which then yielded a response rate of 39.5 percent (AAPOR RR-3: 39.5%). Corley and Scheufele used RTTA 2/3 data to explore the heuristics that the leading U.S. nano-scientists use when they think about regulating nanotechnology. While they found that NSE researchers are more supportive of regulating nanotechnologies when they perceive higher levels of risks, they also found - somewhat surprisingly - that NSE researchers did not change their beliefs about regulation based on perceived benefits. Corley and Scheufele also identified four areas of NSE application in which researchers thought current regulations were insufficient: privacy, human enhancement, medicine, and the environment. Military/defense and machines/computers were areas where regulation is perceived to be adequate. Lastly, they found that male nano-scientists were less supportive of regulation than their female peers, and materials scientists were more supportive of regulation than scientists in other fields. Corley and Scheufele have prepared a manuscript with doctoral student Qian Hu that summarizes these findings (Corley, Scheufele and Hu under review).
RTTA 1: Research and Innovation System Analysis (RISA) |
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