Analyzing festival-based public engagement with research : developing and testing an impact framework for understanding audience responses to science festivals in Europe

Abstract

Public engagement festivals offer rare opportunities for researchers and citizens to converse, yet organisers often lack robust evidence about whether such events change audience perceptions. Repeated measures surveys were used during European Researchers’ Night festivals in Malta and Ireland to explore how attending audiences perceive “research” and “researchers.” Open-ended responses were collected before the events and again afterwards and then analysed inductively using grounded-theory techniques to generate a set of thematic codes. Those codes were distilled into an indicators framework that categorises positive, negative and neutral perceptions of both research and researchers. The framework was piloted quantitatively to assess whether indicators linked to the European Commission’s expected impacts appeared more frequently after the events. Results showed that positive perceptions of research increased, particularly awareness of its social value, while perceptions of researchers were more ambivalent. The indicator-based approach also highlighted where stereotypes endured or where respondents remained uncertain. These findings provide organisers with a concise set of evidence-based indicators for evaluating festival impacts and suggest that pairing open-ended research with structured measures can improve the efficiency, reliability and generalisability of public engagement evaluations. Future applications should test the framework across diverse settings and investigate how to reach audiences who are not already positively disposed toward science.