Background
Social media allow experts to form communities and engage in direct dialogue with publics.
This can help the scientific community and other publics understand each other.
However, little is known about experts’ participation in online communities, or effective ways to prepare them for public engagement.
Research Question
What considerations and practices characterize experts’ participation patterns in online Q&A communities?
Methods
We explored these issues with experts who voluntarily engage with publics on social media.
Stimulated recall interviews were conducted with 20 experts who participate in question-and-answer Facebook groups dedicated to vaccines and nutrition.
Findings and Discussion
The findings suggest that experts employ diverse considerations in their online outreach.
In part, they do this because they try to establish epistemic trustworthiness.
Their considerations can be grouped into three goals and two constraints:
- countering misinformation,
- establishing benevolence, and
- establishing competence, while
- maintaining integrity and
- maintaining clarity.
Two factors were found to impair establishing benevolence: Empathic failure and burnout. They are represented as the blue blunt arrows in the figure below.
These findings help us understand how experts’ participate in online communities.
They can inform curriculum and instruction in science communication training.
Citation
Sharon, A. J., & Baram-Tsabari, A. (2020). The experts’ perspective of “ask-an-expert”: An interview-based study of online nutrition and vaccination outreach. Public Understanding of Science, 29(3), 252–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662519899884
