Information & Library Science, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing & Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 28;16(4):e0249181. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249181. eCollection 2021.
While public engagement with science activities traditionally inhabits physical environments (i.e., museum exhibits), as the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, new types of public engagement with science mediated through information technologies have emerged. Instead of having scientific findings filtered through traditional mediators, scientists have begun to take advantage of social media in order to communicate directly with the general public. This paper focuses on technology mediated public engagement with science in an online environment, specifically the sub-Reddit called "r/science", on a popular platform, Reddit, in which we investigated the factors contributing to user engagement and perceived effects of science communication from the users' perspectives. The survey instrument including user engagement scales, perceived effects of science communication, and demographics were distributed among 2000 participants in the r/science Ask Me Anything (AMA) series. We analyzed 146 survey responses using descriptive statistics and ordinal logistic regression. The findings indicated that the participants were generally engaged compared to ones in other studies that used the same user engagement scales and perceived positive effects on science communication, except when it came to building trust. Furthermore, we found that time spent on this particular platform appeared to be the most important factor when it came to positive perceived effects of r/science AMAs. This type of mediated public engagement has been insufficiently investigated, most particularly in terms of the examination of participants' perspectives. This void is addressed in this study. The findings from the study will also be informative to similar platforms that support mediated public engagement with science.
虽然公众参与科学活动传统上存在于物理环境中（即博物馆展览），但随着互联网的普及，通过信息技术进行的新型公众参与科学活动也已经出现。科学家们开始利用社交媒体直接与公众交流，而不是让科学发现经过传统中介过滤。本文专注于在线环境中通过技术实现的公众参与科学活动，特别是在 Reddit 这个流行平台上的 r/science 子版块，我们从用户的角度调查了促成用户参与的因素以及他们对科学传播的感知效果。该调查工具包括用户参与度量表、科学传播的感知效果以及人口统计学信息，在 r/science 的 Ask Me Anything (AMA) 系列中向 2000 名参与者分发。我们使用描述性统计和有序逻辑回归分析了 146 份调查回复。研究结果表明，与使用相同用户参与度量表的其他研究相比，参与者的参与度普遍较高，除了在建立信任方面。此外，我们发现，在这个特定平台上花费的时间似乎是影响 r/science AMA 感知效果的最重要因素。这种中介的公众参与活动尚未得到充分研究，特别是在考察参与者的观点方面。本研究填补了这一空白。该研究的结果也将为支持科学中介公众参与的类似平台提供信息。
