Page 80 - Fall2020

Communicating Your Research to Journalists (and Your Relatives)
Andy Piacsek
Introduction
Imagine that you are meeting the father of your future spouse for the first time. He owns a small landscaping business. He is interested in hearing about the research you do. How do you to explain it to him?
Your 11-year old niece interviews you for a class report on the kind of work done by a relative. How do you tell her about your research so that she not only understands and sees it as interesting, but that she can also convey that to her teacher and peers?
A reporter calls you to ask questions about your recently published results. Knowing that potentially thousands of people will read or watch the resulting story, how do you talk to this journalist so that your science is accu- rately conveyed?
These scenarios are representative of situations that researchers frequently encounter, yet for which they are often unprepared. The lack of preparedness is indicative of how differently researchers communicate with peers than they do with nonspecialists. There are nuances to how we communicate with different people, of course, depending on whether the person we are talking with is a child, a prospective father-in-law, a possible investor, or a journalist, but these audiences have far more in common with one another than they do with our peers. Thus, the goal of this article is to provide some basic strategies and tips gleaned from science communication professionals to help you effectively explain your research to someone who is not an expert in your field.
Scientists (in a broad sense) are accustomed to a certain level of rigor in communicating their activities and dis- coveries to peers. They prize clarity, precision, directness, and honesty as well as the need to convey details, justify interpretations, and acknowledge uncertainties and the
work of others. Such thoroughness is essential to the process of science, enabling the testing of new ideas, the assimilation of good ideas, and the rejection of bad ideas.
Communicating science to nonspecialists, however, requires a skill set very that is different from the one needed to communicate with peers. One must be cogni- zant not only that a layperson lacks background knowledge, but that they have different vocabulary, preconceptions, and priorities. Some communication habits that are useful with peers, such as diving into the details of a model or an experiment to justify a certain approach, risk confusing or even boring a lay audience. Talking with journalists who will be interpreting and widely disseminating your work is especially tricky. For example, among fellow researchers, an honest discussion about experimental uncertainties is a good way to boost confidence in one’s results; with the public, the opposite is usually true.
It should not be surprising, then, that many scientists, trained to provide accuracy and context, are uncom- fortable engaging publicly in a medium where neither is assured. A Pew Research study (Rosentiel, 2009) found that 76% of scientists polled believed that a “major prob- lem” with the news media is that it “does not distinguish between well-founded findings and those that are not.” Indeed, I have heard fear expressed by several Acoustical Society of America (ASA) colleagues and by other scien- tists that interviews with journalists invariably result in stories that mischaracterize or misinterpret the scientific work. The complicated relationship between scientists and journalists, marked by skepticism and distrust but also by a recognition of mutual benefit, is thoroughly described by Peters (2013).
There are many well-documented reasons for scientists to be active in communicating their work to the public, whether it be through journalists or in scenarios such as
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80 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020 | Volume 16, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2020.16.3.80