• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.2 no.2 s.4
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• pp.1-23
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• 2002

This Article examines the main approaches to the public understanding of science(PUS) in light of the changing relation of science and public. Traditional approach called deficit model recognizes scientific knowledge as a entity, unidirectionally diffusing to public. This View basically presupposes the gap between science and public. Meanwhile, this approach has an aspiration to reduce the gap. So there is a paradoxical situation in the traditional PUS. Public perception of environmental crisis and risk of science has been risen since late 1980's. And the science technology studies (STS) have criticized traditional approach. STS proposes new approach of constructive PUS. Constructive PUS conceives the public to have heterogeneous, local characteristic. This approach has been very fertile both in theory and practice. But most recently, newly proposed approach, so called heterogeneous PUS, criticizes constructive PUS. Main point of criticism is that constructive PUS has dichotomy between science and public, and romanticizes the public. It is uncertain whether heterogeneous PUS can take place of constructive PUS. But this trend has the implication that the relation of science and public is constantly changing.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.2 no.2 s.4
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• pp.25-54
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• 2002

Without much communication, large-scale surveys of public knowledge of, and attitudes to, science (quantitative PUS) and case-study analyses of the public's understandings of science in particular (constructivist PUS) have dominated in the public understanding of science (PUS) area. Not only methodological preference but also a strong antipathy against value-orientations that each approach presumed to have and support has been barriers for quantitative PUS and constructivist PUS to benefit each other. In order to overcome such barriers, this paper demonstrates that value orientations guiding quantitative PUS have been much more diverse than what constructivist PUS researchers might think, and that quantitative PUS has indeed yielded the results consistent with and complementary to constructivist PUS. Finally this paper proposes that (1)quantitative PUS should test propositions provided by constructivist PUS, so that it can contribute much to the construction of more generalizable PUS theories and policies, and (2)constructivist PUS uses the outcome of quantitative PUS to develop more complex case studies which consider heterogeneous publics, trends of public evaluations of science, and how public attitudes to science in the abstract and public attitudes to science in particular in a specific context have effect on each other.