Assessing what to address in science communication

Abstract

As members of a democratic society, individuals face complex decisions about whether to support climate change mitigation, vaccinations, genetically modified food, nanotechnology, geoengineering, and so on. To inform people's decisions and public debate, scientific experts at government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and other organizations aim to provide understandable and scientifically accurate communication materials. Such communications aim to improve people's understanding of the decision-relevant issues, and if needed, promote behavior change. Unfortunately, existing communications sometimes fail when scientific experts lack information about what people need to know to make more informed decisions or what wording people use to describe relevant concepts. We provide an introduction for scientific experts about how to use mental models research with intended audience members to inform their communication efforts. Specifically, we describe how to conduct interviews to characterize people's decision-relevant beliefs or mental models of the topic under consideration, identify gaps and misconceptions in their knowledge, and reveal their preferred wording. We also describe methods for designing follow-up surveys with larger samples to examine the prevalence of beliefs as well as the relationships of beliefs with behaviors. Finally, we discuss how findings from these interviews and surveys can be used to design communications that effectively address gaps and misconceptions in people's mental models in wording that they understand. We present applications to different scientific domains, showing that this approach leads to communications that improve recipients' understanding and ability to make informed decisions.

Prescriptive scientific narratives for communicating usable science

“…Failure to understand immune processes in individuals' bodies, or vectors within groups, precludes any appreciation of the social good of high vaccination rates (41). Such results reveal gaps in understanding and misconceptions that might impede decision making, which a prescriptive narrative should address (38,39). Interview transcripts provide insights into natural wording, contexts, and metaphors that will make the resulting narrative most useful and meaningful to the target audience, precisely because the narrative will feel familiar and use concepts that are commonly understood (42,43).…”

“…This approach is particularly useful for revealing gaps in knowledge and misunderstandings that need to be rectified (38). In essence, this approach compares the expert model of a given domain to a descriptive model of people's actual understanding.…”

Informing Public Perceptions About Climate Change: A ‘Mental Models’ Approach

“…Experts sometimes resist the use of plain language, because they don't want to appear to talk down to their audience members (Bruine de Bruin and Bostrom 2013 (Davis et al 2006;Smith et al 2008). …”

“…Although surveys can easily be conducted with large sample sizes, semi-structured interviews are needed to inform their design (Bruine de Bruin and Bostrom 2013). Indeed, surveys should include questions about the topics that experts deemed relevant (as identified in the normative research) and that non-experts deemed relevant (as identified in the interviews), in wording that the interviewees used in the interviews.…”

“…However, climate scientists may find it difficult to communicate effectively with non-expert audiences (see e.g., Beyth-Marom 1982;Budescu et al 2009;Nisbet and Scheufele 2009) -as do experts in other domains (Bruine de Bruin & Bostrom 2013).…”