DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AMONG FIVE INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS

The purposes of the present study are (a) to determine whether question items on public acceptance of science and technology are scalable, and if so, what aspects of these attitudes they will represent; (b) how these attitudes differ among nations; and (c) how scalable items relate to non-scalable items on public acceptance of science and technology. To achieve these objectives, national surveys were conducted in 1987 and 1988 in Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, the United States, and Japan. Twelve questions relating to public acceptance of science and technology were used as part of general social surveys. By using Guttman's scaling technique, only five of the twelve items could be scaled. The five items were (a) “some day science will permit complete understanding of the functioning of the human mind”; (b) “most of the social and economic problems we face will be resolved by the advancement of science and technology”; (c) “in the next 25 years, a safe method for the long-term storage or disposal of waste products from nuclear power plants will likely be seen”; (d) “in the next 25 years, a cure for common forms of cancer will likely be seen”; and (e) “in the next 25 years, a cure for senility will likely be seen.” Using correspondence analysis, in the dimension of Euclidean space, if we superimpose the locations of the five nations over the locations of the positive and negative attitudes toward these five items which relate to trust toward science and technology, we find that France is located in the area with the most positive attitudes toward these five items, followed by the United States. The Federal Republic of Germany is located in the area with the most negative attitudes. Finally, Great Britain is located in the area with half positive and half negative attitudes, while Japan is located in the area with neutral attitudes. From these findings we conclude that there are notable differences in the formation of a “trust toward science and technology” scale among the five nations with respect to the five items. If we locate the other seven, non-scalable items (which are related to the importance of environmental problems and energy savings) in Euclidean space using correspondence analysis, we will find that there is no notable relationship between the five scalable items and some of the seven non-scalable items, which indicates that attitudes toward science and technology vary significantly from one issue to another. Therefore,