Citation
Yanowitz, K. (2004). Do scientists help people? Beliefs about scientists and the influence of pro-social context on girls’ attitudes toward physics. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 10(4), 393-399.
Highlights
- The study’s objective was to examine the impact of reading a passage featuring a pro-social context on careers in physics on female students’ interest in science.
- The authors randomly assigned 88 5th- and 6th-grade girls to four conditions. In the treatment condition, participants read a story describing a female physicist who entered that profession to benefit society. Participants assigned to the control conditions read different stories. After reading these stories, the participants responded to a short survey asking how much they liked the story and how interested they were in becoming physicists.
- The study found no relationship between the treatment story and participants’ interest in becoming physicists.
- The quality of causal evidence presented in this study is high because it was based on a well-implemented randomized controlled trial. This means we would be confident that any estimated effects would be attributable to the scientists’ stories and not to other factors. However, the study did not find statistically significant effects.
Features of the Study
Female 5th- and 6th-grade students from low- to middle-income schools within a four-hour radius of the host university were invited to participate in the study. Of the 88 participants, 56 were recruited via participation in a science career workshop hosted by the university and the remaining 32 were recruited by other means. All participants, regardless of workshop participation, were randomly assigned to one of four study conditions.
In the treatment condition, participants read a story depicting a female physicist who used her work to benefit society. Participants in the three treatment conditions also read stories about scientists; one story described a male physicist who used his work to benefit society, whereas the other two described male and female physicists who chose their careers to make discoveries. After reading the stories, participants rated how much they liked the story and their interest in becoming a physicist. The authors conducted statistical analyses to compare participants’ liking of the stories and interest in becoming physicists in each condition. Because measures of liking a story do not fall under the CLEAR Women in STEM protocol, this review focuses on the outcome interest in becoming a physicist.
Findings
- The study found no relationship between the treatment story and participants’ interest in becoming physicists.
Considerations for Interpreting the Findings
The intervention—a one-paragraph story describing a physicist—was not intensive, so the lack of immediate effects is not surprising despite the rigor of the experimental design. The population recruited for the study could also contribute to the lack of observed effects; as noted earlier, more than half of the participants were recruited to participate in a science career workshop and thus were likely to be more scientifically motivated than the other participants, regardless of their assignment to the treatment or control conditions.
Causal Evidence Rating
The quality of causal evidence presented in this report is high because it was based on a well-implemented randomized controlled trial. This means we are confident that any estimated effects would be attributable to the scientists’ stories and not to other factors. However, the study did not find statistically significant effects.