Agency Theory: Toward a Framework for Research in the Public’s Support for and Understanding of Science

Public understanding of science and public engagement around science policy issues takes place within a complex system involving public opinion, values, identities, social groups, media, and social, economic, and political structures and influences. This paper offers a theory of agency that bridges the psychological and sociological and thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding the system underlying public understanding of science, support for science, and the implications of public engagement. Agency theory integrates elements of well-established social science theories into an understanding of human agency. Strategies for improved public engagement are discussed

TAKING CHARGE 2016: A Study of the Strategic Budgeting Priorities of the Residents of Lincoln, Nebraska

This report presents the results of the 2016 Taking Charge initiative sponsored by the City of Lincoln. This initiative included an online survey and a half-day, face-to-face, Community Conversation. Most previous Taking Charge activities have focused more narrowly on the immediate concerns of an impending budget proposal (e.g. which specific programs should be funded or discontinued to maintain a balanced budget). This year’s efforts also focused on specific items relevant to the City’s future budget policy priorities. As usual, residents were also given the opportunity to rate the City’s performance and City officials on a variety of performance characteristics. A number of important findings were identified from an examination of more than 2,300 survey responses and the input provided by 58 participants in the Community Conversation. These findings included the following: Current Priorities • With regard to current priorities, the survey and the Community Conversation revealed consistent support for in-home services for seniors, neighborhood snow removal, and neighborhood swimming pools as participants’ top three rated and ranked priorities. • A total of 46% of those answering the question about how to pay for services that the budget would not cover indicated the City should raise taxes. An additional 10% of respondents indicated the City should both cut other programs and raise taxes. The remainder of respondents indicated a preference for balancing the budget. About 23% indicated that preference by stating they balanced the budget during the exercise; 22% indicated wishing to cut programs other than those listed in the exercise. • The least prioritized program, and most recommended for cutting, was parking and abandoned vehicle enforcement. The programs next in line for potential cuts were non-injury traffic accident reporting, the health information and referral call center, and one day of library service. These priorities were consistently reflected in both the survey and Community Conversation results. • Reasons for prioritizing some programs over others included consideration of the number of persons affected by a program; how the program was perceived as affecting quality of life, safety, and the economy; and the extent to which the program served vulnerable or underserved populations. Future Priorities • Regarding future priorities, survey respondents rated and ranked parks and recreation capital replacement and repair as most important, followed by the construction of the south beltway, followed by StarTran service expansion. • Community Conversation participants were less enthusiastic about parks and more supportive of StarTran and the South Beltway construction future priorities. This was not because the Community Conversation elicited new views undermining support for parks. Both before and after the Community Conversation, only 15% of attendees chose parks and recreation capital replacement and repair as their top priority. It seems that there were simply fewer parks supporters at the Community Conversation than there were among survey respondents. • There was an increase in support for the StarTran expansion over the course of the Community Conversation. Prior to the small group conversations, 32% of attendees chose StarTran as their most important future priority. After the small group conversations, 43% chose StarTran as their top priority. • Consistently, the lowest future priority was golf capital maintenance and repair. This sentiment was expressed by both survey respondents and Community Conversation participants. When given additional options for funding golf capital needs, the preference was for options that would not use City general fund dollars (e.g., fundraising or raising of golf fees). • Reasons for prioritizing some programs over others reflected similar values as those used to evaluate current priorities. In addition, residents considered the overall costs and benefits of programs and whether they believed other funding sources could or could not cover a given program. City Performance Ratings • The City had seen a measurable increase in its performance ratings between 2012 and 2015, according to volunteer (non-random) survey respondents. This increase continued between 2015-2016. This year’s survey was not a random-sample survey and cannot be generalized to Lincoln as a whole. The observed increase in positive perceptions could be due to more persons with positive attitudes toward City government visiting the survey each year, or to improvements in public perceptions, or to some combination of both factors. • Open-ended comments about City performance suggested that people have differing opinions about the Mayor’s office, the City Council, and City employees. Comments also quite frequently mentioned roads and the need for specific improvements. While most of the comments mentioning taxes were made in order to express disapproval of raising taxes, some comments argued for taxes in order to cover valued services. • The City has consistently been rated lowest with regards to fair treatment of all areas of town. Open-ended comments reflecting feelings about fairness indicated that a number of people feel that more wealthy neighborhoods are treated with favoritism and receive more or better services. Others commented that neighborhoods affected by certain decisions need to have say in those decisions

Public Opinions of Unmanned Aerial Technologies in 2014 to 2019: A Technical and Descriptive Report

The primary purpose of this report is to provide a descriptive and technical summary of the results from similar surveys administered in fall 2014 (n = 576), 2015 (n = 301), 2016 (ns = 1946 and 2089), and 2018 (n = 1050) and summer 2019 (n = 1300). In order to explore a variety of factors that may impact public perceptions of unmanned aerial technologies (UATs), we conducted survey experiments over time. These experiments randomly varied the terminology (drone, aerial robot, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aerial system (UAS)) used to describe the technology, the purposes of the technology (for economic, environmental, or security goals), the actors (public or private) using the technology, the technology’s autonomy (fully autonomous, partially autonomous, no autonomy), and the framing (promotion or prevention) used to describe the technology’s purpose. Initially, samples were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, required to be Americans, and paid a small amount for participation. In 2016 we also examined a nationally representative samples recruited from Qualtrics panels. After 2016 we only used nationally representative samples from Qualtrics. Major findings are reported along with details regarding the research methods and analyses

Applying motivational interviewing to parenting act mediation: The promise of the process.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a research-based method of helping people engage in behavior change. MI tools and strategies have been used successfully to help people tackle drug and alcohol addiction, weight loss, and other unhealthy behaviors. MI methods aim to uncover and support a person\u27s desire to change while simultaneously respecting an individual\u27s autonomy. Historically, Ml has been employed in support settings, such as counselors working with clients. In Nebraska, probation officers now employ MI practices to help encourage positive changes while still maintaining accountability if people choose not to follow the terms of their probation. Mediation is all about change. Parties come to mediation because at least one party is unsatisfied with the status quo. Parties who reach an agreement, in essence, agree to change in some respect. In no place is the change more prevalent than in parenting act mediation. Parenting plan mediations almost always involve questions of changing parental arrangements, bettering party communications, and ensuring the best interests of children. The synergies between the two processes hold a lot of promise. MI skills help people plan and support change. Parenting act mediation involves putting a plan together for parties that explicitly describes changes in relationships, interactions, and parenting. Mediation, however, involves a situation that Ml research has yet to test--whether MI skills can be employed successfully in a situation involving a neutral party with opposing parties. With the support of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln\u27s Social Behavioral Science Research Consortium, we are undertaking a pilot study in which mediators from The Mediation Center in Lincoln are being trained in MI skills. This article gives some background on MI, mediation, and that ongoing pilot project

TAKING CHARGE 2017: Satisfaction of Residents of Lincoln, Nebraska

Between June and August of 2017, a satisfaction survey was completed by more than 1,200 randomly-selected Lincolnites (a random sample, yielding confidence intervals ranging from +/- 1-3% for the full sample, and +/- 2-8% at the district level, at the 95% confidence level1). Listed below are the main findings from that survey, including those obtained from examining the overall sample, and from comparisons among Lincoln’s four City Council Districts. Overall Satisfaction Ratings • On average, Lincoln residents reported greater satisfaction than dissatisfaction with most City services in 2017. The average levels of satisfaction were significantly above 3.0 (neutral) for 20 of 22 mean levels of service. As was the case in prior years, some of the highest ratings were given for overall quality of life and fire and emergency medical/ambulance services. This year, we also assessed satisfaction with police services, which was also rated very highly. • The lowest rated service was street maintenance, which was also rated lowest in 2012 and 2015. Street maintenance was the only service upon which City residents, on average, expressed dissatisfaction (that is, a rating that was significantly different from neutral and reflecting dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction). Across districts, street maintenance was rated similarly low. • Ease of car travel also was rated low, with an average rating that was not significantly different from neutral and was significantly lower than in 2012. Ease of car travel was rated lowest by residents living in District 2. • Examination of the 5-year trends in satisfaction ratings for City services demonstrated more areas of satisfaction increase than decrease. Satisfaction with overall quality of life, appearance and cleanliness of the City, the City’s safety and security, recreational opportunities, employment opportunities, ease of bike travel, health department services, job creation/economic development, and snowplowing of City streets showed statistically significant improvement since 2012. Positive 2-year trends included satisfaction with fire and emergency medical services, Lincoln’s overall natural environment, management of sewage and storm water, and street maintenance; each of which increased significantly since 2015. • There were fewer areas of satisfaction decrease. Though average ratings indicated more resident satisfaction than dissatisfaction, availability of affordable housing and City recycling and sustainability demonstrated a downward trend over the past five years. As previously noted, satisfaction with ease of car travel also showed a significant decrease since 2012, resulting in average ratings not significantly different from neutral in 2017

Inspiring and Advancing the Many-Disciplined Study of Institutional Trust

The purpose of this volume is to consider how trust research, particularly trust in institutions, might benefit from increased inter- or transdisciplinarity. In this introductory chapter, we first give some background on prior disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary work relating to trust. Next, we describe how this manydisciplined volume on institutional trust emerged from the joint activities of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation and a National Science Foundation-funded Workshop on institutional trust. This chapter describes some of the themes that emerged, while also providing an overview of the rest of the volume, which includes chapters that discuss conceptualizations, definitions, and measurement of trust; institutional trust across domains and contexts; and theoretical advances regarding the “dark” and “light” sides of institutional trust. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts about the future of and potential promises and pitfalls of trust as a focus of interdisciplinary study

A Drone by Any Other Name: Purposes, End-User Trustworthiness, and Framing, but not Terminology, Affect Public Support for Drones

Projections indicate that, as an industry, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly known as drones) could bring more than 100 000 jobs and $80 billion in economic growth to the U.S. by 2025 [1]. However, these promising projections do not account for how various publics may perceive such technologies. Understanding public perceptions is important because the attitudes of different groups can have large effects on the trajectory of a technology, strongly facilitating or hindering technology acceptance and uptake [2]. To advance understanding of U.S. public perceptions of UAV technologies, we conducted a nationwide survey of a convenience sample of 877 Americans recruited from Amazon’s pool of Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. In our surveys, we used short scenarios to experimentally vary UAV characteristics, the end-users of the technology, and certain communication factors (terminology and framing). This allowed us to investigate the impacts of these factors alone and in combination. In addition, given the conflicts that sometimes arise around scientific findings and technologies (e.g., climate change, vaccines, [3], [4]), we also gave explicit attention to whether and how public support for UAVs varied by self-reported political ideology, issue attitudes, and perceptions of end-user trustworthiness. Finally, because UAVs for civilian purposes represented relatively new technologies at the time of the first survey, we examined whether public opinion is changing over time, as more people become aware of UAVs. We thus administered the same survey twice, separated by one year, in the fall of 2014 and 2015. The results of our experimental manipulations revealed a surprising lack of impact of terminology and UAV autonomy, a small impact of message framing and UAV end-user, and a relatively large impact of UAV purpose. We did not find that public attitudes changed much over the year between samples, and perceptions of end-user trustworthiness were strong predictors of public support. Still, our regression models only accounted for about 40% of the variance in public support, suggesting that additional variables should be studied in future work to gain a more complete understanding of public support for UAVs. We also found evidence of a small amount of political polarization of public opinion related to who was using the UAVs for what purpose, and this polarization appeared to be changing over time. Taken together, our results — which may be especially useful to UAV designers, marketers, and policy makers — suggest there is a need to establish that the UAVs are used for valued purposes and by users that publics find to be trustworthy. However, public judgments might be significantly impacted by personal or local ideologies rather than national priorities. In the next section, we describe in more detail prior research on public support for UAVs, and how we formulated our research questions and hypotheses. We then describe our methods, results, and findings in greater detail

Prompting Deliberation about Nanotechnology: Information, Instruction, and Discussion Effects on Individual Engagement and Knowledge

Deliberative (and educational) theories typically predict knowledge gains will be enhanced by information structure and discussion. In two studies, we experimentally manipulated key features of deliberative public engagement (information, instructions, and discussion) and measured impacts on cognitive-affective engagement and knowledge about nanotechnology. We also examined the direct and moderating impacts of individual differences in need for cognition and gender. Findings indicated little impact of information (organized by topic or by pro-con relevance). Instructions (prompts to think critically) decreased engagement in Study 1, and increased it in Study 2, but did not impact postknowledge. Group discussion had strong positive benefits for self-reported cognitive-affective engagement across studies. Also, for some types of engagement, effects were more positive for women than men. When predicting knowledge, there also was some evidence that discussion was more positive for women than men. Finally, need for cognition positively predicted engagement and knowledge gains, but rarely moderated the experimental effects. Given these mixed results, future research should continue to test theoretical assumptions about the effects of specific deliberative design features

LNK Market Community Conversations

This report details the procedures and results from two public engagements conducted around the possibility of a year-round public market that might be situated in or near Lincoln’s downtown area. The purpose of these engagements was to uncover and explore the range of responses, hopes, concerns, and perceived benefits, barriers, and facilitators of a year-round Lincoln market. A multi-pronged approach was used in which recruitment survey responses from about 135 persons was combined with pre-post surveys and in-depth conversations with 60 persons as shown in Figure 1.1. The final report includes all three strands of information: from the recruitment surveys, pre/post surveys, and from the in-depth conversations. Because the “broader public” is likely to include mostly everyday people without particular expertise related to food and produce, many of the results presented in this report are separated by types or levels of expertise

Climate Change Survey Measures: Exploring Perceived Bias and Question Interpretation

Climate change has become an important yet politically divisive topic in recent years. Further complicating the issue are assertions that climate change– related public opinion surveys used by social scientists are biased or otherwise problematic. We conducted a pilot study to explore questions concerning bias and interpretation of climate change surveys. Our study sample was composed of adult residents of Nebraska (n = 115). We augmented our survey findings with cognitive interviews of a subsample of respondents (n = 20). We assessed study participants’ attitudes about climate change, and perceptions of bias and interpretation of survey questions drawn from previously used survey instruments and national polls. Among our study sample, we found little support for perceived bias within the survey items employed. However, interview findings indicated that particular survey language may have elicited unexpected associations among respondents. We discussed implications for further research