Beware the public opinion survey

By Jason Major

TechNyou

Those public attitude surveys

Public attitude surveys can only ever be a rough guide. Alone they generally reveal nothing about the realities of public attitudes toward a particular technology.  There is often inherent bias in the framing of the questions or the questions are too few or too general to be useful for anything specific.  What they can do is expose the deeper questions we need to ask in more qualitative studies to get to the understanding we need to develop communication strategies or policy.  The problem is interest groups will often cherry pick data from these surveys to “prove” their point. The media then conveys their message.

Professor Dietram A. Scheufele has written a draft article investigating the research involving public attitude surveys that is also a good overview of risk communication research and some of the issues and challenges we face as communicators in engaging the public on issues of emerging technologies.

Professor  Scheufele’s article will eventually become a chapter on public attitudes toward nanotechnology for Susanna Priest’s new book on risk communication and public perception of nanotechnology.

Risky business

One of the trickiest things to get a handle on is how people perceive risk relative to their acceptance of a particular technology or how it is used, something that public attitude surveys have tried to do with many copping serious criticism – see Prof Scheufele’s article.

One of the criticisms Professor Scheufele points to in public attitude surveys is the use of a single question asking people whether they think the risks of nanotechnology (or any technology really) outweigh the benefits; the benefits outweigh the risks; or the risks and benefits are about equal.  As he rightly points out this question alone without something more qualitative is useless and reveals nothing.  I personally would not be able to answer that question: which nanotechnology are we talking about (they all have completely different set of risks and benefits); who is responsible for managing the risks and how are they being handled; what sort of regulatory system is in place….and so on?

Dietram A. Scheufele is the John E. Ross Chaired Professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication in the College of Agricultural & Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin.