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A new resource for science communication studies Martin Bauer and Asdis Ragnarsdottir Public Understanding of Science 1996 5: 55 DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/5/1/005 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/5/1/55
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Public Understand. Sci. 5 (1996) 55–57. Printed in the UK
CORRESPONDENCE
A new resource for science communication studies
Martin Bauer and Asdis Ragnarsdottir respond to William Evans and Susanna Hornig Priest’s call for a stronger connection between content analysis and social theory (Public Understanding of Science, 4, 327–340)
The study of science communication could briefly be classified into three related exercises: firstly, the study of the production of popular science, the institutional analysis of scientists, media people and other activists, and their missions and motives; secondly, the study of the products of these activities such as news media material, popular science books, exhibitions etc.; and thirdly, the study of audiences for various media segments and their reception of particular messages. Media science constitutes a social fact in its own right. To study and theorize these three related issues across time and space constitutes a promising research programme to further the causes of public understanding of science and to study the modern process of mass communication. In that context we warmly welcome William Evans and Susanna Hornig Priest’s description of content analysis of science news as a research field which is limited in scope and under-theorized, and which fails to give an adequate account of its theoretical content.1 We find it increasingly unsatisfactory that science communication research lacks a historical perspective, and has become preoccupied with schemes and activities and their efficiency without seeing them in a wider perspective. In order to make a difference we have undertaken a systematic analysis of products of science communication, and have archived a large sample of science news from the British national press over the period 1946 and 1990. We are now in a position to enquire systematically of the ‘whats and hows’ of science in the press over the last 45 years. An offshoot of this undertaking is the Science Museum Media Monitor Archive (SciMuMeMo) which we are making available to researchers for studies in the recent history of popular science in Britain. Here we briefly describe the project, the data archive, and the ways researchers can make use of it in the future. The project, which is jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine and the Science Museum, London, has several objectives: (a) to explore the pattern of science and technology coverage in British newspapers after 1946;
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(b) to collect systematically news material as a basis for a research archive; (c) to develop a standard instrument that assesses both the quantity and the quality of press coverage, to provide us with a cultural indicator of public representations of science and technology; (d) to provide a basis for exploring systematically the changing relationship between science and politics in the post-War period; and (e) to test specific hypotheses about trends in media coverage of science and technology in the long run. The archive currently comprises 6000 hard copies of press articles from a stratified random cluster sample of science and technology coverage between 1946 and 1990, meaning that newspaper issues were randomly selected, and within each issue we selected all relevant articles according to specified criteria of ‘scientific’. The stratification of the newspaper sample takes into account the segmentation of the newspaper market over that period in order to achieve a representative sample of British science news. The criteria used for segmentation are: the difference between the quality and popular press, political left and right orientation, opinion leadership function, and readership figures. These criteria suggested a grid of newspapers, for each of which we generated 10 random dates per year to scan and to select relevant news material. Our sample contains every second year from the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror beginning in 1946; two years every decade for the Guardian, The Times, and the Daily Express, the Sun after 1986, and the Independent from 1990. We are currently making efforts to update the press material on a regular basis so that we can monitor short and long term developments of media science. Since the 1960s television has displaced radio and newspapers as the main source of news information. However, the British national press has retained a stable readership of around 15 million readers a day (around 30% of the population) over the post-War period, while the structure of the newspaper market has changed in various ways. Various comparative content analyses have shown that the topical content of science on TV and in the daily press is not markedly different, although the presentation differs in line with the grammar of the medium. This strengthens our view that press analysis continues to provide a cost-effective way to define a cultural indicator of popular science issues. For our content analysis, we have developed a standardized coding frame which is theoretically informed by the ideas of news ‘narratives’. Each article is coded on around 100 variables covering formal aspects such as article size, page number, page location, headline, etc., and narrative variables specifying the storyteller, the actor, the area of agency, the location, the scientific event, various consequences, and the moral of the story. Taking seriously the conception of sciences and the media as relatively independent systems of communication we classified each articles in terms of its scientific disciplines (physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, etc.) and in terms of its news area (defence, energy, gardening, gossip, consumer issues, business, etc.). We are currently undertaking extensive analysis of the database to characterize the changing content of science news over the last 45 years in Britain, and hope to present some striking results in the very near future. The 6000 press articles are boxed by newspaper and by year. Our database, while it is a content analysis, can also serve as an index system to trace articles of particular interest by subject area or author. The Science Museum Library offers access to the material; it can offer study space; and it provides photocoping facilities.
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A new resource for science communication studies
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We invite researchers of public understanding of science worldwide to make use of the archive material for their own purposes, and to collect similar material in their own country so that we may move towards systematic comparisons of science coverage in different countries over a longer time period. A four-volume technical report including basic results, methodology, code book and coding frame is accessible at the Science Museum Library in London.2 The sampling procedure and the content analysis methodology (Volume II) and the coding frame (Volume IV) are available from the authors on request. A page shortly to be displayed on the Internet will give an idea of the kinds of variables we used in the content analysis of science coverage. For enquiries on the archive and requests for material, please contact: Asdis G. Ragnarsdottir, Media Monitor Archive, Science Museum Library, Exhibition Road, London SW7 5NH, UK; telephone +171 938 8237; fax +171 938 8213; e-mail
[email protected]; or Dr Martin Bauer, Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK; telephone +171 955 6864; fax +171 955 7005; e-mail
[email protected].
References 1 Evans, W. and Hornig Priest, S., 1995, Science content and social context. Public Understanding of Science, 4, 327–340. 2 Bauer, M., Durant, J., Ragnarsdottir, A., and Rudolfsdottir, A., 1995, Science and Technology in the British Press, 1946–1990. Technical report Volumes I–IV (London: Science Museum).
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