Are science communication audiences becoming more critical? Reconstructing migration between audience segments based on Swiss panel data

Abstract

Over the past years, pundits, journalists, and others have diagnosed fundamental shifts in the public’s perception of science. Many of them have posited that audiences are becoming more critical toward science or that people trust science less. However, systematic empirical analyses of such assertions are lacking. Based on panel survey data (N = 339) and segmentation analysis, we investigate migration between four segments of the Swiss population over 3 years. We find that 45% of participants changed their attitude between 2016 and 2019 to such an extent that they got assigned to a more positive or more critical audience segment. The majority of them migrated to more critical segments, which is in line with assumptions of fundamental shifts in the public’s perception of science.

Niels G. Mede

Science Communication Researcher

I am a Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ) of the University of Zurich, where I also completed a PhD in communication studies. My work focuses on science communication, digital media, public perceptions of science, threats and attacks against scholars, climate change communication, and survey methodology. Over the last years, I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Life Sciences Communication of the University of Wisconsin—Madison (2022), the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (2023), and the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology (2024).