Build and Broaden 3.0: Assessing the Effects of a Publicly Engaged Scholarship

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This project seeks to learn the impact of publicly engaged scholarship and contribute to diversifying the academic community. The study will measure the social and research impact of public engagement, or scholars communicating beyond academic audiences and sharing their expertise with a broader, more general audience. There is a small but growing academic literature that shows scholarship that is publicly engaged can have greater academic and societal reach, but there is little empirical evidence of this relationship between engagement and reach when it comes to social science research. To examine whether and the extent to which there is such a relationship, this study will use a randomized controlled trial involving different public engagement strategies that publicize social science scholarship and measure indicators of academic and societal reach. The study will include a survey experiment in which participants are randomly assigned to read about research shared via public engagement tools. The survey questions will measure public confidence and trust in science and scholarly experts. This research project uses intersecting interventions to measure the impact of publicly engaged social science and builds on the small but growing evidence-based literature on how scholarship that is publicly engaged can have greater academic and societal reach. The study includes a randomized controlled trial to measure the relative impact of multiple public engagement strategies (e.g., blog posts, Wikipedia entries, social media shares, etc.) that publicize social science scholarship, measuring indicators of academic reach, such as citation counts, as well as societal reach, such as Altmetric scores. The study’s post-treatment survey questions will assess participants’ views of the research being discussed and of science and scholarly experts more broadly. This study will provide evidence of how public engagement strategies can improve policy impact and public trust in research. The public engagement work done for the randomized controlled trial will also bring research findings to the broader public and in a way that is accessible to a lay audience. This work will be supported by a new training program for advanced undergraduate students. Undergraduate fellows will receive formal training in research methods in one academic term and then complete a research apprenticeship in the following academic term.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.