Science in public: Trends and determinants of public attitudes toward science

As science and technology have exerted their influence across the whole range of the structure and functioning of contemporary society, the question of how the public perceives science has attracted growing attention from the scientific community and social scientists. This dissertation addresses this question by examining the social determinants of public attitudes toward science and the trends of these attitudes. Using the U.S. Science and Engineering Indicators Survey and the General Social Survey, this dissertation examines the effects of the level of scientific knowledge, the amount of education, the content of education, gender, race, income, the general tendency to trust in social institutions, and political ideology, along with other sociodemographic variables, on attitudes toward science in general and on attitudes toward specific applications of scientific research.;The results of this study highlight the limitations of the deficit model of public understanding of and support for science and technology, which attributes public skepticism about science and technology to the public's low level of scientific knowledge. This study shows that emphasizing the effect of the level of scientific knowledge while ignoring the effect of other dimensions of education exaggerates the role that the level of scientific knowledge plays in shaping attitudes toward science. This study also shows that the effect of the level of scientific knowledge on attitudes toward specific controversial applications of science and technology is far weaker than that on attitudes toward science in general, which demonstrates the limitation of the deficit model as an explanation of public resistance to controversial sciences and technologies.;By analyzing trends in public attitudes toward science among survey data accumulated for three decades, this study also tests whether public confidence in science has declined, as is claimed by many scientists and theories of late modernity, and examines whether the overall trends mask some diverging trends across important social groups. The trend analysis shows that while public confidence in science has been quite stable over the last three decades, the gap across race and educational levels tended to increase during the 1990s.