Casual conversations in everyday spaces can promote high public engagement with science

ABSTRACT

University researchers are asked to make their work relevant and accessible to people beyond their research fields, increasingly by undertaking public engagement with science themselves. However, academic outreach often only reaches an already-science-attentive audience through traditional museum visits or lecture-style presentations. Even programs designed to take advantage of public spaces may still pose barriers to non-traditional audiences, particularly in terms of time and money to attend. We designed a program to promote public engagement with science through casual conversations with pairs of scientists meeting public patrons in everyday and leisure spaces such as bars, coffeehouses, libraries, and laundromats, in both urban and rural locations. We conducted unobtrusive observations of these events at two time points as a case study and used thematic analysis to characterize the patterns of utterances, content of utterances, body positions, and object interactions with 29 groups. We found instances of high, medium, and low engagement, and describe characteristics of each type. We present example cases and suggest their use during professional development with scientists for public engagement and reflective practice. Overall, these conversations show promise for high public engagement with science and opportunities for true mutual learning between scientists and non-traditional public audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Public engagement with science
• scientific outreach
• everyday spaces
• leisure spaces
• case study
• observation

Acknowledgements

We thank all our venue staff and management for their continuing partnerships. We also thank Laura Diederick for comments on this manuscript and help in designing the program’s instantiation. We thank Gina Hillsberry and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this manuscript. We thank Sarah Edison and Cheyenne Hoover for help in advertising the program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kathryn A. Stofer is a Research Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist in the Department of Agricultural Education and Communication at the University of Florida.

James Rujimora is a master’s student in Mental Health Counseling at the University of Florida.

Danielle Sblendorio is an undergraduate researcher at the University of Florida.

Estherland Duqueney was an undergraduate researcher at the University of Florida and is now a medical student at the University of Florida.

Meghana Tatineni is an undergraduate researcher at the University of Florida.

Gabriela Gaudier was an undergraduate researcher at the University of Florida and is now a medical student at Tufts University.

Data availability statement

Data are available in Open Science Framework repository, doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/EMXWN.

ORCID

Kathryn A. Stofer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3659-490X

Danielle Sblendorio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3253-503X

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant OCE 1038990. Division of Ocean Sciences.