Study On Science Popularization Policies Of China

With the rapid development and changing trends of modern technology,science and technology have been playing an important role in social progress and productivity growth.Development of science and technology shows a distinct positive relation with economic growth and generates profound effects on social development and civilization of a country.The huge driving impacts that science and technology have produced on society and economics,make people realize the significances of improving quality of their nation.Because popularization of science is the main tool to improve national scientific quality,the policies of science popularization,as a powerful level and important thrust to adjust the resources of popularizing science,its strengths and weaknesses will directly influence the smooth and health development of popularization of science,and further produce a significance in improving the national scientific qualities as well as progresses of society and economics.Therefore,the importance of doing in-depth analysis on science popularization policies is self-evident.On the basis of a systematic examination and in-depth study on policies of science popularization,this research employs theories of bibliometrics and policy instruments and applies social networks,content analysis and other quantitative methods,to dig into the policy texts of science popularization in national level and explore potential problems hiding behind the direct observations,hoping that this can provide certain theoretical basis for making science popularization policy,advancing quality of science popularization policy and promoting citizens' scientific qualities.Research objects of this dissertation are policy texts of science popularization in national level.The issue and implementation of these policies create favorable institutional environment to improve national quality and provide powerful policy guarantee for the development of popularization of science in our country.Through bibliometric methods,511 science popularization policy texts are collected,and the carrier forms,numbers and times series of these texts are counted and analyzed.Seen from the carrier forms,these policy texts can be divided into three categories:namely science popularization policies existing in the form of laws and regulations which account for 3.1%,existing in the form of department regulations that take up 14.5%,and existing in the form of normative documents whose proportion are about 82.4%.Shown from the number of published policies,the development tendency of science popularization policy presents a combination model between gradual and radical type,the number of published policy being relatively stable in the initial stage and increasing obviously after 2005.From time series,the historical evolution of science popularization policies in China can be divided into three development stages:that is,science popularization policy in its initial stage(from 1994 to 2001),which develops around economic construction and promoting citizens' science consciousness and serves the nation's economic strategy;the developing stage(from 2002 to 2005),aiming at strengthening infrastructure construction for science popularization;the last one is the dense phase(since 2006),emphasizing the common development of non-profit undertakings in public popularization of science and profit-making science popularization industry.Through analyzing the policy releaser,it is found that the main body has a large scale,individual policy releaser is the main form of issuing policy while joint policy-releaser covers a relatively low proportion which has presented obvious rising trends,and science popularization policy-making shows overlapping operations by different departments.Through network analysis of issue releaser of science popularization policy-making and correlation analysis between subject and theme,the network structure of policy releaser of science popularization policy presents "small group" trends.The focus of these policy releaser shows overlapping.From the perspective of policy instrument theory,this study employs content analysis method to discuss the policy tools selection of science popularization.Conclusion can be reached that the frequency of environmental policy instrument using was highest,then was the supply-type policy instrument and the lowest was demand-type policy instrument.Further analysis shows that legal regulation accounts for the highest proportion and strategic measures takes second place in environmental policy instruments.Public service takes the most proportion and the rest shows equilibrium trend in supply-type policy instrument.An overall serious lack exists in demand-type policy instrument.In a word,environmental policy instruments shows a state of differentiation,supply-type policy instrument shows a trend of equilibrium and demand-type policy instrument shows a shape of absence.In order to reflect the core contents and its dynamic trends of science popularization policy,ROSTCM,a kind of word frequency analysis software,is used to extract keywords,and co-word matrix of keywords and correlation and dissimilarity matrix are constructed;then UCINET and SPSS were used to do cluster analysis,multi-dimensional scaling analysis and social network analysis of these keywords;and finally explore the structure of science popularization policies on the bases of above analysis.Conclusion could be drawn from the analysis:contents of science popularization policy cover a wide range of themes,and possess distinct focus points;contents design of these policies exists flaws;in addition,the structure of science popularization policy is unreasonable.Through this study,this paper concludes that:(1)the historical evolution of science popularization in China displays distinctive characteristics of stage;(2)the number of issued science popularization presents a mixed combination of "gradual and radical" trends;(3)strengthening the collaboration between policy-making bodies is the practical path to resolve the problem of resource waste and low cooperation level between these policy-making bodies;(4)to optimize the structure of policy instruments is an effective way to improve the tool system of science popularization policy;(5)correcting the flaws in contents design of science popularization policy and the unreasonable policy structure is the most important measure to improve the contents of science popularization policy.