The 2012 LOSS (Local Outreach to Suicide Survivors) Conference will be held May 31 - June 1, 2012 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Dr. Frank Campbell, a leading expert in Suicidology along with other experts, will share the lessons learned in years of helping survivors of suicide, how sudden traumatic loss impacts survivors and grief through the different developmental stages.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MOREPublic engagements involving residents, scientists, and policymakers are increasingly being used to shape policy in the US. Despite the attention paid to such engagements, there is a lack of knowledge and theory concerning which forms, features, and contexts of public engagements are meaningful to participants and produce insightful information that is useful to scientists and policymakers. The major barriers to the advancement of public engagement as a social science, include: (1) the diversity of approaches within and across engagement practices; (2) the lack of theoretical and empirical attention to the reasons why, or mechanisms by which, certain public engagement features connect to various outcomes; (3) the lack of agreement on definitions of “effective” engagement, whether the focus is on the public participant or the policymakers, or, in the case of scientists, others who might use the input; and (4) the correspondent lack of standardized, reliable measures to use to compare different forms and features of engagements.
This project will take the next step in building a model of public engagement in science and innovation policy by addressing each of these barriers, in the specific context of nanotechnology. The project will examine two commonly varied features of public engagement, social context and purpose of the engagement; apply multiple social, cognitive, and related psychosocial theories to predict the probable impacts of these features, as well as relevant mediators and moderators; assess multiple definitions and indicators of effectiveness; and systematically develop theoretically-based, reliable, and valid measures of constructs that can be used across multiple science and innovation policy contexts in subsequent research.
Expected outcomes of this research include data that will provide a foundation for public engagement model-building, contribute to the scientific understanding of why public engagement outcomes differ across studies, as well as guide the use of public engagements in shaping science and innovation policy, in general, and nanotechnology, in particular.
Key Partners
Center for Communication Research, College of Mass Communication, Texas Tech University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Engineering
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Biological Sciences
Funding
National Science Foundation
PytlikZillig, L. and Tomkins, A. (2011). Public engagement for informing science and technology policy: What do we know, what do we need to know, and how will we get there?. Review of Policy Research, 28(2), 197-217.
Name: Alan Tomkins
E-mail: atomkins@nebraska.edu
Phone: (402) 472-5688
