Science knowledge and attitudes across cultures: a meta-analysis

By N. Allum, Patrick Sturgis, Dimitra Tabourazi, I. brunton-smith. 2008

632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd958e368103a84dcd0be53f9c3dae8cd7ac131b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Shirley S. Ho

In Social Psychology

1. Shirley S. Ho
2. A. Sprenger
3. Bradley J. Stastny
4. R. Hartman
5. Liang Chen
6. N. Dieckmann
7. Kenneth G. DeMarree

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Shirley S. Ho
2. Edson C. Tandoc
3. C. Cooper
4. Liang Chen
5. Patrick Sturgis
6. Kenneth G. DeMarree
7. Michael Hanslmaier

Citations in the corpus

• Media Literacy as a Key Strategy Toward Improving Public Acceptance of Climate Change Science (2011, background): “It has often been assumed that people with high science literacy (low deficit) are more likely to accept and support science, but recent research does not support this assumption (Allum et al. 2008).”
• Enhancing urban biodiversity and its influence on city-dwellers: An experiment (2014, background): “In fact, it is well established in the psychological literature that providing information could influence people’s attitudes (Allum et al., 2008).”
• Modeling Attitudes Toward Science: Development and Validation of the Credibility of Science Scale (2017, background): “were positively associated with science literacy (Allum et al., 2008; Gauchat, 2008, 2011), and negatively associated with individualistic and hierarchical cultural”
• Middle Alternatives Revisited (2010, background): “(Allum et al. 2008; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Miller 2001).”
• Science Literacy or Value Predisposition? A Meta-Analysis of Factors Predicting Public Perceptions of Benefits, Risks, and Acceptance of Nuclear Energy (2019, background): “The marginal role of science knowledge in shaping public attitudes towards nuclear energy has also been reflected in public opinion studies of science and technology in general (Allum et al., 2008).”