Social and Behavioral Science Reporting

Relatively little social and behavioral research has received media attention, as compared with natural science research. This issue has acquired particular importance in recent years because of growing demands that research findings have an impact. Indeed, increasingly, the proposal has been that the value of research should be judged by its practical payoff. Consequently, it has been suggested that a key element for increasing and improving the use of social science knowledge by policymakers lies in the effective dissemination of research results beyond academic or professional means of diffusion.

There is no doubt that there are plenty of reasons why social scientists should be dissatisfied with the ways in which social science knowledge is presented in the mass media. Unlike the case for natural science knowledge, there is no such thing as journalists specialized in the reporting of social science knowledge, with the exception of economics. On the other hand, social scientists complaints' about media treatment of research and the difficulties that they face in “getting their message across” are common. Social science knowledge is disseminated in the course of covering a vast range of other topics, such as business, politics, and crime. Social science knowledge is “invisible,” insofar as it is often not identified as “social science knowledge.” This is especially true of “social facts,” conveyed (for example) by social statistics and that people continuously “ingest,” as it were, without necessarily being aware of the social research on which such statistics are based.

Several typical research questions emerged from those concerns, such as: What is the extent of the media use of social science research? What are the determinants of utilization of social science research knowledge? And how actually are research findings represented in the media?

That line of research, by focusing primarily on what can be seen as deficiencies of the “mass mediation” of social science knowledge, obscures [Page 805]a more fundamental observation that social science knowledge has become an omnipresent and quasi-mundane resource on which journalists (and everyone else) continuously draw to address a great variety of subjects. In other words, however interesting is the analysis of the relationship between journalists and social scientists, this is not enough for understanding the place of social science knowledge in contemporary society. For that reason, we consider that the reflexivity thesis introduces a much-needed second line of approach to the analysis of social science reporting.

Reflexivity has been an important concept used in various ways for characterizing contemporary society. The multiplication of expert claims and their intrusion in day-to-day life through the mass media are seen as a major basis for the development or reflexivity. For theorists of reflexive modernity, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, among others, laypeople appropriate expert knowledge on a more or less continuous basis. In a “detraditionalized” and “individualized” society, laypeople problematize what used to be taken for granted, and continuously appropriate new knowledge—including expert knowledge—about their practices, this knowledge thereby becoming constitutive of their practices.

This is relevant because it allows us to describe the “closeness” between social science knowledge and ordinary language or, in other words, to understand the fundamental reflexivity between social science and its “subjects,” and of the circular relationship between social science knowledge and commonsense knowledge.

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