This paper reviews key issues of public understanding of science (PUS) research over the last quarter of a century. We show how the discussion has moved in relation to large-scale surveys of public perceptions by tracing developments through three paradigms: science literacy, public understanding of science and science and society. Naming matters here like elsewhere as a marker of “tribal identity.” Each paradigm frames the problem differently, poses characteristic questions, offers preferred solutions, and displays a rhetoric of “progress” over the previous one. We argue that the polemic over the “deficit concept” voiced a valid critique of a common sense concept among experts, but confused the issue with methodological protocol. PUS research has been hampered by this “essentialist” association between the survey research protocol and the public deficit model. We argue that this fallacious link should be severed to liberate and to expand the research agenda in four directions: contextualizing survey research, searching for cultural indicators, integrating datasets and doing longitudinal analysis, and including other data streams. Under different presumptions, assumed and granted, we anticipate a fertile period for survey research on public understanding of science.

In this paper we develop a paradigm for research on social representations based on ideas that informed a study of modern biotechnology and the public (Durant, Bauer, Gaskell, 1998). Researching what the public thinks about such a new technology might be approached within a traditional attitudinal, risk perception, or audience reception framework. However, drawing inspiration from 'La psychanalyse, son image et son public' (Moscovici, 1961) we opted for the approach of social representations theory. We were persuaded that the conceptual richness of this theory was better suited to characterising the evolution of content, structure and functions of the voices and images of public concern, in response to the challenging developments in genetic engineering and modern biotechnology. Here we step back from our inquiry into biotechnology among European publics and reflect on the lessons for research on social representations, a phenomenon and concept of central concern to social psychology.Having decided to work within the framework of social representations, the contemporary researcher finds relatively little guidance on the implications of the theory for the design of empirical research. Breakwell & Canter (1993) note that almost every method known to the social sciences has been used in the study of social representations. While methodological pluralism may be virtuous, when a theory apparently embraces a range of approaches from ethnography to experimentation, of data sources from pictures to attitude scales, and analytic procedures from qualitative interpretation to multi-dimensional scaling, without an explicit rationale, virtue looks more like an absence of conceptual clarity. The methodologically more coherent proposals of Doise, Clemence & LorenziCioldi (1993) to operationalise aspects of social representation in terms of multivariate statistical procedures, has the advantage of opening common ground with traditional attitude research, but in so doing may constrain the development of social representations theory by limiting it to the interpretation of quantitative analysis. If research on social representations is to progress and live up to the promise of the theory, what is required is an elaboration and clarification of the key conceptual distinctions, and a discussion of their implications for the conduct of research; this is what we attempt in this paper.The paper starts with an interpretation of a classical study in the tradition of social representations followed by a discussion of how this approach leads to a different framing of research areas, such as on the 'public understanding of science'. We then discuss the problem of representation and the 'iconoclastic suspicion', leading to a definition of elements of an ideal type study. Seven implications for research on social representations are elaborated. These implications serve as a guide for the design and evaluation of research in this theoretical tradition.

Recent controversies about genetically modified foods in the United Kingdom and several other European countries highlight the apparent differences that exist in public opinion on this subject across the Atlantic. Why are people in the United States seemingly untroubled by a technology that causes Europeans so many difficulties? The results of survey research on public perceptions of biotechnology in Europe and the United States during 1996-1997, together with an analysis of press coverage and policy formation from 1984 to 1996, can help to answer this question.

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