Attentive Public

The term attentive public refers to a group of individuals within a society who have a high level of [Page 73]interest in a subject or issue and who believe that they are reasonably well informed about that subject. The term is a part of a broader conceptualization of issue specialization first advanced by Gabriel Almond in 1950 in regard to public awareness and involvement in foreign policy issues. Donald Devine applied the concept to politics generally, defining an attentive public for politics; although this application of the attentive public has not been carried forward in the literature, there is still substantial attention paid to individuals who do not vote and abstain from the political process. Further, the concept is very useful to science communicators because it defines one important audience and may be helpful in thinking about the level of communication appropriate to this audience.

Jon Miller and Kenneth Prewitt applied the concept to science and technology policy and were able to identify an attentive public that reported a high level of interest in scientific and technological issues and who claimed to be “very well informed.” In addition to its application to science and technology policy and to politics generally, this concept has also been applied to energy policy, local school policies, and cross-national studies of science policy. Early measurements of the attentive public found that about 10% of adults in the United States qualified as members of the attentive public for science and technology.

In subsequent work, the attentiveness paradigm has been extended to include an attentive public, an interested public, and a residual public for any specialized issue or cluster of issues. In this conceptualization, members of the attentive public are both very interested in an issue and believe that they are very well informed about that issue. Members of an interested public report a high level of interest in an issue or subject, but do not think that they are very well informed about it. Members of the residual public for any specific issue or cluster report lower levels of interest in the subject and usually report corresponding lower levels of knowledge or understanding.