Bibcode
Rodríguez Hidalgo, I.; Díaz Vilela, L. F.
Bibliographical reference
EAS Publications Series, Volume 16, 2005, pp.81-92
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2005
Citations
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Refereed citations
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Description
A survey of outreach related beliefs, attitudes, and activities of the
Spanish professional astronomers is presented. More than one hundred
scientists answered an ad-hoc drawn up questionnaire, whose results have
been analysed statistically. This feedback form is an improved version
of that used in a previous research carried out by the authors with a
sample of members of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
(Díaz Vilela & Rodríguez Hidalgo 2005). Some of the
studied items are the actual time and effort devoted to outreach by a
researcher, the role of outreach within his work, the valuation of
outreach activities in his curriculum, socially, or economically, the
opinion about who should have the responsibility of organising and
performing popularisation tasks, etc. Three kinds of studies have been
performed: the descriptive one is based on the frequencies and means of
variables; a Principal Component Analysis was applied to get a shorter
number of belief-attitude dimensions; and an inferential one, derived
from a Multiple Regression Analysis which provides a reliable
description of the beliefs-attitudes scale grouping outreach related
beliefs into 6 components, 3 of them more significant. A simple
regression allows us to predict about a 50% of the variance of the
outreach practices.