Attitudes toward science among the European public: a methodological analysis

Over the past decade, several influential papers examining the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes toward science have been published. The 1992 Eurobarometer has been the preferred source of data for analysis, and a number of suggestive conclusions regarding the extent and nature of the links between knowledge and attitudes have been proposed. Summated scales were built through principal component analysis of the attitudinal items and reliability analysis, but little attention has been paid to the content of the attitudinal items and to the metric and conceptual weaknesses of the scales. A more parsimonious revision of the data, carried out here, shows that the measures used are fuzzy and, as a consequence, the empirical support for some published results is very limited. We suggest that more theoretical effort should be devoted to the design of questionnaires and to the combined use of statistical exploratory techniques and qualitative analysis in the interpretation of the data.