The CNS-ASU Program

RTTA Program 2: Public Opinion and Values

Goal: To monitor, among both the public and scientists, the understanding of and values relating to NSE and its potential societal outcomes, track these variables over time, and examine the role of the media in reflecting and influencing them.

Activity 1: Public Opinion Polling: Current research shows that public awareness of nanotechnologies is low, and that the relationship between public knowledge of nanotechnologies and understanding of their potential impacts is complicated – in part by the role of the media. Assisted by ASU’s Institute for Social Science Research, we will work from two of these studies by CNS-ASU scholars to track the understanding of and values relating to NSE and its potential societal outcomes over time. In years 1 and 3, we will develop surveys covering general questions about nanotechnology as well as questions specific to the two research themes. Respondents will be tracked longitudinally over the project. Independent samples will be drawn each year to replace subject attrition. This sampling and survey strategy will provide cross-sectional and longitudinal data analyses for public opinion about nanotechnology.

Activity 2: Media Influence: We will explore the complicated role of the media in reflecting and influencing public opinion about NSE, building on a decade of study of audience reactions to an award-winning science web site, The Why Files, headquartered at Wisconsin. CNS-ASU will, with the help of a professional science writer, prepare and “publish” a small number of NSE stories and then employ those stories as focal points for examining, through both classical and field experiments, individuals’ abilities to understand the concepts and processes behind the stories, the likelihood that such information is embedded in existing belief systems, and how specific information influences attitudes about NSE.

Activity 3: Researchers’ Values: We will monitor how the values of researchers (and other stakeholders) involved in our Deliberation and Participation Program (see below) change over time. We will also communicate what we learn about public values to all CNS-ASU researchers. This feedback loop between public values and researchers’ values will thus be explored as a dynamic unto itself, and it can inform activities in the Reflexivity, Assessment, and Evaluation Program.

Public Opinion and Values Program Leaders: Dietram Scheufele (Wisconsin) and Elizabeth Corley (ASU)
 

RTTA Program 1: Research and Innovation System Analysis (RISA)
RTTA Program 3: Deliberation and Participation

RTTA Program 4: Reflexivity, Assessment and Evaluation