Science Indicators, History of the NSB Project on

The current U.S. National Science Board (NSB) report series Science and Engineering Indicators[Page 710]was one of the products of the planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS) that Robert McNamara introduced into the federal government during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson mandated the use of PPBS throughout the federal government. In the 1968 amendments to the National Science Foundation Act (Pub. L. No. 90-407), a requirement was added for the National Science Board (NSB) to make an annual report to the president and Congress on the state of science in the United States. This statutory requirement led to the creation of a series of Science Indicators reports in 1972, which was modified in 1987 to become the current Science and Engineering Indicators reports series—a widely used source of data for science communicators.

Although the NSB had issued annual reports beginning in 1969, these were not organized in the form of a special report. Following the recommendation of Roger Heyns, a member of the NSB, the board directed its staff to prepare a special report to be titled Science Indicators 1972 and to organize the report into a series of chapters that reported of various kinds of newly developed “indicators” of science and scientific output, following the work in previous years of the social indicators movement. In the official letter of trans-mittal for the 1973 report—Science Indicators 1972—NSB Chairman H. E. Carter wrote that the project's goal was to develop indices design to uncover “the strengths and weaknesses,” with respect to the achievement of national objectives, of U.S. science and technology.

The introduction to the report noted that the first five chapters included the major indicators developed to date, including science spending, numbers of personnel and students, facilities, and some international comparisons. The introduction also noted that the report included two additional chapters, one of which presented survey data regarding opinions and attitudes related to science, results that were not considered “amenable to purely quantitative treatment.” Although the 1968 amendments to the National Science Foundation Act specifically authorized funding for social science research, it appears from this wording that the NSB held some reservations about the “scientific” nature of attitude measurement.

The first three chapters on public attitudes toward science, appearing in the 1972, 1974, and 1976 Science Indicators reports, were based on sets of approximately 20 questions purchased from the Opinion Research Corporation as a part of their periodic omnibus survey. The authorship of these early questions is unclear, and no member of the small science indicators staff in those early years had a clear responsibility for the public attitudes chapter, which the board apparently did not consider to be a part of the indicators program per se. There was substantial criticism of the quality of the early attitude measures included in the indicators from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The Science Indicators 1978 report did not include a chapter on public attitudes.

As a result of extensive discussions between NSF science indicators staff and SSRC leaders, the NSF issued a request for proposals in 1978 asking for proposals for a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of public attitudes toward science and technology that would be more rooted in the social science literature and that would reflect current social science practice. After a national competition, a proposal from the National Opinion Research Center was accepted, with Jon Miller and Kenneth Prewitt named as co–principal investigators. A new approach and survey was designed and a national personal interview study was conducted in 1979, the results of which were reported in Science Indicators 1980. The NSF funded a second national survey in 1981, using a national telephone sample selected by the Public Opinion Laboratory (POL) at Northern Illinois University, which was reported in Science Indicators 1982.

...