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After much havering I have settled on Social Psychology as my second discipline (which is where I started).  One important reason is that Gemma has lent me a really good textbook!  Also it is extremely relevant.  I contemplated Film Studies and Ecology because I wanted to try something out of the ordinary – but Film Studies turns out to be a bit of a non-subject and Ecology (although fascinating) was just too hard to relate to my research question.

Social Psychology seems to resonate in all sorts of ways.

I am primarily interested in scientists public engagement with science and over the last couple of weeks this has become a bit more precise – how can the scientific community use the web to help non-experts distinguish good science from non-science.

Social psychology hits because:

1) Subject matter – it studies (among other things) how people form opinions and attitudes and how they communicate

2) Methodology – social psychology combines qualitative and quantitative methods in a way I find convincing.  In particular it recognises the primacy of the experiment as a method and that  with only qualitative data you have ideas but not evidence.

3) It is an example – it is itself a science which needs undertake public engagement and differentiate science from non-science.  In fact it is more prone than most sciences to misinterpretation.

So Social Psychology here we go.