The 'deficit model' of public attitudes towards science has led to controversy over the role of scientific knowledge in explaining lay people's attitudes towards science. The most sustained critique has come from what we refer to as the 'contextualist' perspective. In this view, people's understanding of the ways in which science is embedded within wider political, economic and regulatory settings is fundamental for explaining their attitudes towards science. Most work adopting this perspective has relied on qualitative case studies as empirical evidence. In this paper we challenge the de facto orthodoxy that has connected the deficit model and contextualist perspectives with quantitative and qualitative research methods respectively. We simultaneously test hypotheses from both theoretical approaches using quantitative methodology. We use data from the 1996 British Social Attitudes Survey to investigate the interacting effects of different domains of scientific and contextual knowledge on public attitudes toward science. The results point to the clear importance of knowledge as a determinant of attitudes toward science. However, in contrast to the rather simplistic deficit model that has traditionally characterised discussions of this relationship, this analysis highlights the complex and interacting nature of the knowledge-attitude interface.

The correlation between knowledge and attitudes has been the source of controversy in research on the public understanding of science (PUS). Although many studies, both quantitative and qualitative, have examined this issue, the results are at best diverse and at worst contradictory. In this paper, we review the evidence on the relationship between public attitudes and public knowledge about science across 40 countries using a meta-analytic approach. We fit multilevel models to data from 193 nationally representative surveys on PUS carried out since 1989. We find a small positive correlation between general attitudes towards science and general knowledge of scientific facts, after controlling for a range of possible confounding variables. This general relationship varies little across cultures but more substantially between different domains of science and technology. Our results suggest that PUS research needs to focus on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the clear association that exists between knowledge and attitudes about science

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.

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