5 things you can do RIGHT NOW to stay up-to-date with science communication research

This article was originally posted on the Australian Science Communicators website.

Scientists and science communicators are people who see knowledge as a foundation or actions and behaviours, right? A scientist, planning an experiment, will know all about the latest research in their field to maximise their chance of success. We build new knowledge on the knowledge of others.

But how often will a science communicator or scientist-who-communicates-science stop and think whether what they are doing communication-wise is based on current best practice? Do they check whether someone has already done what they are doing or planning on doing? Have other people been successful? Is there a way to do things better?

I’m always surprised when I meet people in science communication who aren’t engaged with science communication research. To me, it’s just applying what I was taught to do as a scientist. “But I can’t access the journals!” I hear people say, or “I don’t know what journals to looks at!” which are probably fair comments – but there are ways around this as you will soon see.

And there is also the good old “I don’t have time to keep up with research”. I think this is an interesting comment given we expect the busy general public to keep reading the vast amount of science writing that we collectively produce to keep up with the latest research.

It doesn’t have to take up a lot of time to keep up with science communication research. In fact, you could end up saving yourself considerable time in the long run by avoiding wasting time on something and, who knows, we might actually be able to improve public engagement with science!

So here are my five things that you can do right now to keep up-to-date with science communication research. All you need is access to the internet!

1) Set yourself up to get email alerts/newsletters from the key journals
You may not be able to get the whole papers, but you can read the abstracts (and who really wants to read more than that, right?). In my opinion, the key journals in our field are:

• Public Understanding of Science (SAGE journals)
• Science Communication (SAGE journals)
• International Journal of Science Education, Part B (Taylor and Francis)

There are other journals too, of course, and more theoretical ones if you are interested, but these will get you started.

2) Follow the journals on social media
Public Understanding of Science now has a blog and a Twitter account (@SciPublic). Again – links may only take you to abstracts but if you are just wanting to get a feel of current trends that may be enough. Journal of Science Communication has a facebook page.

3) Use Google Scholar
This platform will allow you to search for science communication research articles if you don’t have access to library databases. You should know this already, but I’ve learned never to assume. Again, you might only get abstracts, but you never know.

4) Follow key science communication researchers on social media
Science communication researchers are using social media to reach out to their audiences in the same way as science communicators. In fact, several science communication researchers currently research how to use social media to communicate science! Once you’ve found people who publish on things you are interested in, find out if they have a Twitter account or blog and start following. They will probably share information about more than just their own research. This includes accounts and Facebook pages for research organisations and groups too!

5) Follow key researchers on Academia and/or ResearchGate
If you are currently in research, you might already have a profile and do this for your specific field. But you should also put in “science communication” as a term, and see who you pull out. If you are not in research you may have never heard of these sites before! Quite often researchers will place open access versions of their papers, or conference presentations on their pages that you can download, no matter where you work.

So there you have it! At least 3 of these are set and forget type things that will have the latest research delivered straight to you. And there are lots of other options to stay in touch, not in the least to have an enthusiastic friend who will send you random things they read! Yes, of course it will take some time to read the things that come by, but I think we owe that to ourselves and our audiences. If nothing else, putting yourself in the position of the audience will remind you how it feels to have to open your mind to new information, especially if it challenges what you already thought about how to communicate science.

Heather Bray is an ex-scientist, science communicator and researcher at the University of Adelaide. She is a member of the ASC committee in SA. She manages a research group blog, as well as having personal and research blogs. She is on Twitter @heatherbray6.

Behind the #scicomm scenes: Talking to children about meat production

Our group recently had a paper published in the journal Appetite. The personal inspiration for this work came partly from my time working as a PhD student at Sydney and Melbourne shows in the Pigs and People display. We would be on the microphones all the time talking to people about pigs during the show, but we were told not to talk expressly about meat on the microphone and “slaughter” was definitely a word to avoid. We could answer questions openly off mic off course, but it was felt that parents may not appreciate us being too graphic in front of their children. This was during the ‘Babe’ years, but 20 years on the idea that we (or more specifically the meat production industries) might be avoiding being open about meat production on the basis of a perception made me wonder how do Australian families talk about where meat comes from?

This has been my first “real” paper and it had been interesting to finally try out the things I’ve been telling scientists to do for years in science communication. It’s too early to see whether it’s all paid off (in the sense that it’s helped my career as a researcher) but so far I feel like this has been a great start to returning to academia and being able to apply all of the #scicomm things. It all starts to get a bit meta actually: doing research that aims to improve science (research) communication and trying to be a good research (science) communicator at the same time. Anyway, here are the steps we took to extend the reach of our work beyond out academic peers:

1. We worked with our University’s media office to get a media release out as soon as the paper was publicly available. (Actually it was a bit after because Appetite is very quick at getting the accepted version up online – even before final edits!)
2. On the back of the media release I was asked for 5 radio interviews and I said yes to all of them. 1 didn’t happen for a few weeks, 1 pre-recorded, 1 live in studio and 2 live via phone. I can’t be grateful enough for my experiences with Radio Adelaide and being involved in a live show because of how this helped me manage my confidence. There is no other way to get confident than practice!
3. My friend Sarah Keenihan wrote a piece for The Lead which was shared in all sorts of interesting places. I got pinged on Twitter by a Canadian Mummy/food blogger site 3 times a day for a week!
4. We shared the paper URL, media release, The Lead article, and interviews in our own social media networks and added it to our Academia and ResearchGate profiles.
5. We checked with our library about the self-archiving policies of the Journal. Apparently after an embargo period Appetite will allow us to put a pre-publish version on sites such as Academia and ResearchGate as well as in the University of Adelaide’s digital repository. This means that the research will be freely available to people who don’t subscribe to journals.
6. On the basis of the media release we were invited to do a piece for The Conversation (but we could have pitched one also). They wanted it to be a part of a series which took a while to be published but you can read the full article here. On the back of that I was asked to do 3 more radio interviews, all live via phone.
7. And now I’m linking The Conversation piece into all of my blogs and LinkedIn (like this piece – again meta). I would have done it earlier but had been waiting on The Conversation and if we hadn’t got that I would have done my own version and shared that via my social media networks.

So what does all of this ‘outreach’ mean? I’ve already been asked to speak about the work at some meetings and conferences, but that might also be on the back of a lot of networking I did last year as well. I do feel like more people have heard about the research and that includes potential funders (I hope) of future work. I have to be honest about that as it’s part of the reality of being a grant-funded research-only academic.

In addition to trying to secure future-funding, academics are often challenged to define the impact of their work in other ways. We are also challenged to define impact in science communication; often it’s impact on the public but increasingly we are asked to demonstrate the value of research communication to the funders and to the Universities. I now have media monitoring reports that can put a dollar value on the air time that the interviews are equivalent to. I have also checked the Altmetrics for the paper and we are doing very well. I have seen research that suggests a good Altmetrics score leads to high citations and that’s where we start to hit paydirt for academics in terms of track record. [As an aside, while trying to find the link to that research, I stumbled on it’s Altmetrics score. When I said we are doing very well – this blows us out of the park!].

But all of this is starting to make me sound (and feel) a little mercenary. These kind of things are important to me only because they enable me to do the work I want to do, and that’s been the biggest thrill of all. I’ve been able to share our work with people who I think will value it. Now there are a heap of people out there who talk about agriculture who know that Australian families talk to their children about meat production at home, during meal preparation and eating, before their children start school, and in a way that aligns with their values. While we found differences between urban and rural people, the belief that children should know how meat is produced was shared, as was respect for the animal that gave its life to provide it. To me, this is a fundamental first step to encouraging better conversations about food production, so that we can work out together how to produce safe, nutritious, affordable food, that is produced sustainably and humanely. now and into the future.

‘Mummy, where does steak come from?’ How Australian families talk about meat

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Heather Bray; Anna Chur-Hansen; Rachel A. Ankeny, and Sofia Zambrano R.

Australia is a nation of meat-eaters. Our identities are deeply tied to our pastoral history: we have the highest rates of meat consumption in the world. But with increasing urbanisation, Australians are becoming more disconnected from how their food, including meat, is produced.

A survey undertaken for the Primary Industries Education Foundation of Australia reported that 75% of year six children thought cotton socks were an animal product. Although there are programs to teach children how vegetables grow, there aren’t too many (at least at primary school level) that involve raising an animal for food.

Our research group has been investigating a range of questions related to Australians’ understandings of “ethical” food, including community attitudes to farm animal welfare. We wondered how children learned where meat came from, and whether parents felt comfortable having this discussion with them.

In many settings in Australia, discussion of slaughter is taboo, with the exception of families that engage in farming or hunting. In many other cultural contexts, such as in Asia and the Middle East, slaughter is more visible. It is part of everyday life and major religious festivals.

Shutterstock

Our research, recently published in the journal Appetite, involved a survey of 225 primary carers of children from households where meat was consumed. (It included parents who were vegetarians so long as their children ate some meat.)

Most of the parents – almost all of whom had talked with their children about meat production – had done so when the children were five or under. Most conversations about meat production occurred when preparing or eating meals.

Parents felt it was important for children to know where their food comes from, preferably from an early age. In fact, they reported that the older kids were when told where meat comes from, the more likely they were to become upset.

Most (64%) of the carers in our study were women, and there were some differences in the way that women and men thought about meat eating.

Women were more likely to agree that children should make conscious decisions about eating meat. They were more likely to be understanding if their children stopped eating meat and more likely than men to feel conflicted about eating meat themselves.

Men were more likely to think that children should eat what is served to them without question, and that meat should be eaten as part of a healthy diet.

We also found that people who lived in cities seemed to find these conversations about food animals and meat more difficult than people in rural areas. City dwellers were more likely to express a preference for avoiding these conversations and feel they lacked some of the necessary knowledge to talk about meat production.

Families who lived outside of the cities didn’t perceive these conversations as difficult or to be avoided and thought that children should be shown aspects of animal production for food.

Shutterstock

Most of the participants shared stories of how their children learned about the origins of meat. For rural children it was part of their day-to-day lives, with some being directly involved in raising farm animals for food.

Others (particularly city dwellers) described instances where children had become upset and chose not to eat meat for a period of time. One of the key themes that both rural and urban parents thought needed to be communicated was a sense of respect: treating animals well on farms, dispatching them humanely, and recognising the effort that goes into producing meat.

The gendered aspects of our findings are interesting, although not surprising, as the links with meat and masculinity have been well documented. Culturally, women have stronger links than men to meat avoidance and concern with animal welfare.

The attitudes expressed by rural people in our study may be directly linked to their roles in animal production for some participants, but may also reflect other rural values.

Our research highlights that the home environment is where children start to learn about food production, including meat, and that parents talk to children about meat in ways that reflect their own values about meat production.

Our research team (which itself holds diverse views on meat eating) was struck by the importance of the value of respect to most study respondents. It’s an encouraging starting point for a broader conversation about the future of ethical, sustainable and affordable food.

 

---

This is the third article in our ongoing series on food and culture Tastes of a Nation. Previous instalments ask: when did we get so obsessed with food? And can we be Australian without eating indigenous food?

Do you have a story idea for this series? If so, please contact Madeleine De Gabriele.

Heather Bray, Senior Research Associate; Anna Chur-Hansen, Professor of Psychology; Rachel A. Ankeny, Professor of History, and Sofia Zambrano R., Visiting Research Fellow

What I said to 200 16 year-olds at the National Youth Science Forum

29 years ago I participated in the National Science Summer School, now known as the National Youth Science Forum. On the 7th of January 2016 I gave the alumni talk at the Session A Rotary Dinner. My brief was to talk about my life after the forum, as if my 16 year-old self was sitting in the audience. This is what I said …

What do food labels teach people about food ethics?

(This post was originally posted on the Food Values Research Group blog on December 22, 2015)

A new publication from the Food Values Research Group examines the idea of ethical food labels as pedagogy (or a way of teaching). This book chapter draws on the idea of food labels as boundary objects that can be interpreted differently by different communities, in particular food producers and consumers, and looked at how ethical food labels are being interpreted based on both research literature and our own research. Case studies presented in the chapter are genetically-modified foods and foods with animal welfare claims.

This book chapter is one of the first scholarly works to be published from the ARC Discovery Project “What shall we have for tea? Toward a new discourse of food ethics in contemporary Australia” (DP110105062). It features in “Food Pedagogies”, Edited by Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan and is available through Ashgate Publishers.

 

 

‘Ethical’ shoppers find food labelling inadequate

(This post was originally posted on University of Adelaide News & Events on Tuesday, 10 November and was written by David Ellis, Media Officer)

Researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that despite growing interest among shoppers to make ethical food choices, they feel that food labelling is not empowering them to do so.

As part of a major research project, researchers in the University’s School of Humanities have conducted focus groups to better understand people’s attitudes towards labelling, such as those on free-range eggs, meat, and genetically modified (GM) foods.

“Although most Australian food labels are currently adequate to allow basic discrimination between products – such as core ingredients and nutritional content – many products today claim to be ‘ethical’ in some way, without consumers really understanding what that means,” says Dr Heather Bray, a Senior Research Associate in the University’s School of Humanities.

“Such labelling often lacks consistency and does not present consumers with enough in-depth detail to help inform their everyday food decisions. Our research shows that people who want to eat ‘ethically’ are often frustrated when they try to make good choices about what to buy.”

The Adelaide studies show that many people who are willing to eat animal products believe quite strongly that free-range meat is of better quality, is more nutritious and tastes better than non-free range meat. “In this case, people who are reading a product labelled as being humane may also be reading that label as an indicator of quality,” Dr Bray says.

“However, our studies also show that most consumers have little to no understanding of meat production and how free-range meat or eggs differ from non-free-range,” she says.

Current GM food labelling is also inadequate for a number of reasons, Dr Bray says. “While there are laws to ensure that food containing GM ingredients must be labelled as such, there are also a number of exceptions within the labelling requirements.

“There is also no legislation regarding labelling to indicate the absence of GM ingredients. Consumers who buy a product marked as being ‘GM-free’, expecting to receive a ‘healthier’ version of a product, may not realise that all versions of the product available in Australia are GM-free,” Dr Bray says.

Dr Bray says shoppers often misinterpret when there are GM components in food. “Although there are no fresh GM fruit or vegetables sold in Australia, many of our research participants viewed seedless watermelons and ‘overly large’ strawberries with suspicion as being potentially GM. This is a case where better labelling may help inform the consumer,” she says.

This Australian Research Council-funded research project is part of ongoing work by the Food Values Group at the University of Adelaide. Some results have recently been presented by Dr Bray at a one-day conference, The Label Conversation in Roma, Queensland, and form the basis of a chapter co-written with Professor Rachel Ankeny, who led the project, in a food research book to be published next month.

Public perceptions of agriculture: What influences consumer choice?

(This post was originally posted in the Food Values Research Group blog, at the University of Adelaide)

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Heather Bray

Making a meal of GM food labelling

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

By Heather Bray and Rachel A. Ankeny

In this final instalment of GM in Australia – a series looking at the facts, ethics, regulations and research into genetically modified crops – Heather Bray and Rachel Ankeny explore the murky world of food labelling.

---

In all countries in which genetically modified (GM) food is sold, such as Australia and the US, the issue of food labelling has been hotly debated.

While consumer and anti-GM groups call for better labelling of GM foods, the food industry’s position is that our labelling system is good enough to allow people to choose whether to eat GM foods.

Meanwhile, consumers are confused and frustrated. So what is needed?

The first post

“I’ve never regretted doing it as a degree. I could wish to know more than I know, but it’s one of the most splendidly broad biological educations you can have … As an adjunct to travel … it’s absolutely splendid. You can’t look out a window anywhere without being fascinated, and having a feeling for whatever it is you’re looking at.”

Professor Nancy Millis, on agriculture 

I’m fascinated by agriculture – both the scientific and cultural aspects. I studied agricultural science at University, and went on to a PhD in animal science. I was a research scientist. I have been (and arguably still am) a science communicator in agriculture. Now, I’ve returned to research to try and understand how people think about agriculture.

Here, I plan on sharing my work, and the work of others in this space ‘between the scientific and the social, cultural and historical aspects of food and fibre production’.