Taking stock of the literature in the thematic field of “Science, Social Representations and Communication”

The research line “Taking Stock of the literature in the thematic field of Science, Social Representations and Communication” is one of 13 foci inserted into a common framework aimed at evaluating the worldwide dissemination of the scientific production driven by the Social Representations theory. The aim is to take stock of the scientific field developed in more than 50 years by conducting an empirical meta-theoretical analysis of the literature on Social Representations, mapping the development of different paradigms, the related research methods, the thematic areas and their impact on the various applied fields within the multi-generational community of scientists and across different geo-cultural contexts. In order to achieve the aim and explore the development of the Social Representations Theory since 1952 and its dissemination in different geo-cultural contexts we analysed the literature on the Social Representations Theory (SRT) in the areas of public understanding of science, communication and education published in more than 50 years using the Grid for meta-theoretical analysis specifically developed by de Rosa (version 2014). We traced the development of the Theory, different paradigmatic approaches to the object of the study, various methodological techniques used in the research in the above-mentioned areas, by analyzing the data using descriptive statistics; Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) has been performed using R software (ver. 3.3.1), the variable categories have been visualized using Tableau software (ver. 8.1). Further on, in order to investigate: a) to what extent the dissemination of knowledge and science popularisation affect and are affected by socio-cultural resources in different cultural contexts and according to various decades from 1952 to 2016; and b) how the science and technological development influence social representations, the abstracts and the key words of the selected corpus (N = 655) have been submitted to the Descending Hierarchical Cluster Analysis and the Correspondence factorial analysis (supported by the software Iramuteq). The results of the study show the way the Theory of Social Representations evolved in time with the development and application of different paradigmatic approaches-families to the object of the study on social representations. In the course of time the paradigmatic approaches evaluated and found their way and got applied in the research in different geo-cultural contexts. Thirdly, the Theory developed from its birth in 1950’s-1960’s and got evolved and disseminated in different fields (like public understanding of science, communication, education, etc.), attracting not only academics – who came from Social Psychology and related fields – but also researchers and practitioners working in various areas (like technology, education, economy, environment, health, community, political science, etc.), who applied the Theory in their research studies in different contexts. The results of the data analysis also show the crucial role that different socio-and geo-cultural contexts play in the dissemination of knowledge and science popularisation. Further on, we may assume that the internal debates and the external critique of the Theory’s propositions which took place in the 1980’s and in the 1990’s influenced significantly the evolution of the Social Representations Theory. The thesis has the “three papers” Format including three articles: 1) Social Representations, Science, Communication and Education: Paradigmatic Belonging in Time and Geo-cultural Context; 2) Methodological Profile in the Social Representation Literature on Science, Communication and Education: from polytheism of methods to the “modelling” approach; 3) Social Representation Faced to Science and Technological Development, its Regulatory Policies and Impact on Education. The results of the research were presented at the international conferences in Marseille, Naples, Rome and Seville in 2016. Two joint papers were published in conference proceedings: 1. Cultural dynamic of Education, Science and Social Representations in the worldwide research landscape and contemporary media scenario. EADTU2017 Proceedings – The Online, Open and Flexible
Higher Education Conference: Enhancing European Higher Education ‘Opportunities and impact of new modes of teaching' (Rome, 19-21 October 2016), pp.18-33, ISBN: 978-90-79730-25-4. 2. Social Representation Faced to Science and Technological Development, its Regulatory Policies and Impact on Education, ICERI2016 Proceedings – 9th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (Seville, 14-16 November 2016), pp. 8306-8316, ISBN: 978-84-617-5895-1.