CritiCC's member María T. Soto-Sanfield has recently published a paper with Isabel Villegas-Simón on the attitudes of Spanish Television proffessionals about science in television and scientific outreach. The paper is titled Actitudes de los profesionales de la televisión española sobre la ciencia en televisión y la divulgación científica, and it was published in the journal Communication Papers.

The paper is the result of a project funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Tecnology (Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología).

Abstract: It is presented a research which objective is to observe the attitudes of Spanish television proffesionals with administration responsabilities on the creation, production and emission of contents about the relations of the audiences with the scientific content and outreach. The research followed a mixed methodology: qualitative-quantitative. Two focus groups with the participation of 5 professionals each one left to identify the attitudes. Then, a quantitative attitude research (Likert scales) applied to 450 professionals in 6 regions, workers in teh public and private televison with different coverage range, left to enlarge those attitudes. The main results show that, in general, these proffesionals don't have clear, intense and consistent attitudes toward the approached topics. However, they consider that television is a convenient media for broadcasting scientific information and that it is possitive that television do disclosure. Also, the tenure of the media they work for, the region where they belong to, the familiarity with the production of scientific contents and the nature of the work they practise arerelationed differently with specific attitudes. This information is relevant for the academia, the institutions promoting knowledge, the Spanish audiovisual system and the audiovisual regulators.

The whole paper is available here: