Uncertain times, uncertain science: How the public views scientific uncertainty
Paper Title: A Mixed-Methods Study of Public Understanding of Scientific Uncertainty
Author(s) and Year: Becca Beets, Dominique Brossard, and Dietram A. Scheufele, 2025
Journal:Science Communication (closed access)
TL;DR: Using a series of focus groups, the authors find that public understanding of scientific uncertainty can be sorted into three main themes: process-related uncertainty, context-related uncertainty, and impact-related uncertainty, along with multiple sub-themes. They then used these themes to develop and test a survey scale that could measure how well the public understands scientific uncertainty.
Why I chose this paper: As a scientist, I regularly encounter people who struggle with the idea that uncertainty is an inherent part of science— and I can’t blame them. Even I often conflate “science” with “facts,” when it’s more accurate to say science is a method of finding answers. When I found this paper, it was interesting reading the excerpts from the focus groups that showed how people viewed scientific uncertainty in different ways. Though I didn’t discuss the new public understanding of scientific uncertainty (PUSU) scale fully in this bite, I also found it fascinating to read how people responded to the different items of the scale.
When you’re looking for an answer to a question, it might be frustrating if someone gives you an answer with a caveat of uncertainty. But uncertainty is unavoidable in science— though I’ve found it’s often poorly understood[BB1] . Uncertainty in science comes from a number of sources, from methodology (will a sample of a population accurately reflect wider trends?) to impact (will new technology have a negative impact on society?), and acknowledging it is an important part of research. To figure out how people can better understand the uncertain nature of science, a new study asks what the public’s current understanding is and uses that information to develop a measurable scale of their knowledge.
The Background
When reviewing literature on the public’s understanding of scientific uncertainty (PUSU), authors Beets et al. identified that two questions had limited consensus: (1) how the non-expert public conceptualizes scientific uncertainty, and (2) how PUSU could be reliably and validly measured. They emphasized that uncertainty is multifaceted, encompassing areas from study design and results to debate among scientists and future impacts of findings, and that, to their knowledge, no study so far has developed a “comprehensive” way to measure it.
This paper includes two studies, with the first study addressing two research questions: (RQ1) How do non-expert publics conceptualize the sources of uncertainty in science? and (RQ2) What sources of scientific uncertainty should be included in a scale measuring PUSU? The second study—which I do not fully discuss in this article to keep it more of a bite than a meal—goes on to assess a potential scale of PUSU based on the answers to RQ1 and RQ2.
The Methods
To investigate RQ1, the authors worked with an external marketing firm, KW2, to conduct seven U.S. focus groups over Zoom. They used an online screening survey to identify potential participants, inviting 464 qualified respondents to focus groups representing one of the following seven characteristics: science background, no science background, liberal, conservative, religious, not religious, or urban, based on their response. In total, 38 participants took part in the focus groups, with each group having 4-7 participants. Each group’s moderator followed an interview guide with questions that covered three themes: uncertainty in daily life, uncertainty in science, and communicating about scientific uncertainty. The interviews were then coded using MAXQDA 2024 software, and common themes were found across the responses. These themes were then used to answer RQ2, and then to conduct study 2.
The Results
Three main themes were found, along with several subthemes:
Theme 1: Process-related uncertainty: This theme covers the uncertainty that is part of the practice of science. The theme is broken up into four subthemes of uncertainty: methodological (the ways scientists get their answers), interpretation (how different factors might affect how results are interpreted), replicability (whether findings are consistent across replications), and evolves (how scientific knowledge changes over time with new evidence). The authors found that Theme 1 and its subthemes were the most discussed sources of scientific uncertainty across the focus groups.
Theme 2: Context-related uncertainty: With this theme, uncertainty is related to the context of different kinds of science, such as the field or the types of questions being asked. The two subthemes for this topic are: questions (how some questions can have multiple answers or interpretations) and fields (how some fields can be physically studied while others are inherently theoretical or abstract).
Theme 3: Impact-related uncertainty: This theme deals with uncertainty around the wider impacts of science. Once again, there are two subthemes: future effects (how scientific interventions or inventions could affect us in the future) and risks (concerns about how science could have negative or undesirable impacts).
To address RQ2 (What sources of scientific uncertainty should be included in a scale measuring PUSU?), the authors used the three themes above as the sources of uncertainty to be measured on the PUSU scale. Question items for the scale were developed from the 8 themes as well as from existing measures of scientific uncertainty uncovered during the literature review. Study 2 tested this scale, which is fully detailed in the paper.
The Impact
By breaking down the different ways, the public understands scientific uncertainty, scientists can begin to measure it in a consistent and replicable way. According to the authors of the paper, not all the themes they identified had been previously measured. This opens the door for future research on those themes and demonstrates the novel nature of their findings. Also, as mentioned earlier, this paper includes a second study which develops and tests a new scale to measure PUSU. The authors say in the conclusion section of the paper that the findings of this second study supported the new scale, which was developed using the three main themes of uncertainty that they had originally identified through the focus groups.
The study is limited in some areas, including the small sample of participants for the focus groups, which was not representative of the entire U.S. population. Additionally, the new PUSU scale will likely require further adjustments and testing in future research. Overall, however, the results of the paper represent an increase of knowledge in the study of public understanding of scientific uncertainty, which is integral to advancing the study of science communication.
Written by Alex Music
Edited by Diego Ramirez Matin del Campo and Crystal Colón Ortiz
Featured image credit: Photo by Katerina Holmes