As part of a larger project to understand public engagement around chemistry, this study describes a unique research collaboration between the Museum of Science Boston (MOS), the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), and science communication researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) to better understand people’s views of chemistry and what factors shape those views. This work was part of an NSF-funded research study (ChemAttitudes, award #1612482) and this presentation focuses on UW’s role assessing views of chemistry in a more general public, to better understand and complement the findings MOS and SMM captured on the museum floor. It will outline: 1) questions that shaped initial research design, 2) the surveying process and analysis methods we used, and 3) how each step of data collection informed subsequent collections and analysis, as well as some of the strengths and challenges of the collaboration. The goal is to illustrate how collaborative research can inform study design through multiple angles as well as present some research design and analysis that might be useful to engagement practitioners. We touch briefly on each of these areas in more detail below.<br/><br/>First, we will outline how our collaboration began, what the goals were, and what research questions we formed from those goals. Second, we will describe the survey design, which used two waves of surveying through the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. The platform is an attractive option for surveying larger groups and running survey-embedded experiments and is inexpensive enough that it could be useful for running pilot tests or collecting data to supplement evaluation data. In this section we will focus in particular on how we translated research questions into features of the survey and analysis and what some of the strengths and challenges were with our methods of data collection and analysis. We will also discuss some of the results as examples of how they complemented findings from MOS and SMM. Finally, we will close with a summary of the challenges and successes of this particular collaboration and tips for creating such collaborations and using a variety of methods to understand science outreach outcomes. This section will include the steps we took to create regular and effective communication across the research team, taking into account challenges of communicating across geographical distances, professional experiences, and sometimes distinct research goals.<br/>

Understanding interest, relevance, & self-efficacy: Chemistry at the museum and beyond

2019 Spring National Meeting

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