Research And Validity Assessment On The ’Science Culture Index’ Built On PUS Indicators

This dissertation studies on the Science Culture Index(SCI) on basis of the PUS(Public Understanding of Science) indicators.The intention of this research is to merge the PUS indicators with the universal standard science indicators system,then a comprehensive science culture index which stands for the public value on science and technology can be obtained.At the very beginning, the author represented the concept of science culture and the social impact of the science and techonology development.Then a brief introduction of the PUS theory and the history of PUS survey among UK, EU, India and US was made.On the basis of an thorough and extensive literature review, this research outlined the clue on sience indicators’evolution and made an analysis on the PUS indicators system’s development and future picture.The30-year research on PUS experienced three phases of research formulars, which can be descripted as:"science literacy-public understanding of science-science and society".The author in the view of new trend in PUS study, made a feasibility research on the mergence of PUS indicators and other objective science indicators,then built up a Science Culture index conception and structure model.The comparative analysis among China and European (EU27) countries’public understanding of science indicators (including science knowledge,science attitude,science interests and science egagment) was conducted under sociology methods such as regression analysis and cluster analysis.Via the curvey estimated method,the researcher made a equivalent transformation of the’science attitude’ factor,the the multilinear equation of PUS index.According to the result of fomer comparative analysis, the author tried to find the difference between Chinese and European people on PUS especially the difference among social groups both in China and EU, then sevral constructive advices can be given on public science communication policies and developing stragety.Then under the research conclusion of the literature study and quantitive analysis,this dissertation brought out a structure model.A fomular of science culture index was given by applying the principal components analysis method,then the value of each country including china and EU27were calculated.On the basis of this result,28contries was ranked by PUS index,STS index and SCI index separately.A further elaboration on the ranking peononmenon and background analysis was made,then proposals for future science policy was given. At last, the author put forward some thinking of future study on public understanding of science.