How do people perceive risks associated with their mobility behavior, and how do they inform themselves about the mobility transition? How do science influencers on YouTube convey scientific topics such as astrobiology or the search for extraterrestrial life? These are the questions that researchers from the International Risk, Crisis & Science Communication Research Group (iRisCS-Com) have been exploring over the past months within the framework of two ongoing research projects.
Risk perception in the transition to sustainable mobility
At the International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference (ICRCC), Elisabeth Wagner-Olfermann and Andreas Schwarz presented findings from the interdisciplinary MOVEwell project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR). The project examines, among other things, how people in rural regions of Germany perceive the transition to sustainable mobility and how they obtain information about it—including risk-related aspects.
Data were collected last year in two real-world laboratories in Thuringia. There, employees of large companies, where sustainable mobility concepts are to be implemented in the coming years, were surveyed about their attitudes and information practices. The project is a collaboration between iRisCS-Com, the Thuringian Innovation Center for Mobility (ThIMo) at TU Ilmenau, and Bauhaus University Weimar, and it will continue until 2029.
Science influencers and communication about extraterrestrial life
Another research project focuses on how scientific topics related to astrobiology and the search for life beyond Earth are presented on YouTube. Together with computer scientists Dr. Anamaria Berea and Abdullah Almalki from George Mason University (Washington DC), Andreas Schwarz presented initial results of a study at the online symposium IAU404 and the ICRCC, analyzing these contents from the perspective of science and risk communication.
The study combines manual content analyses with computational methods. Among other things, it examines public discussions about potential scientific discoveries—such as the exoplanet K2-18b, the detection of phosphine on Venus, or speculations about signals from the star “Tabby’s Star” (KIC 8462852). Additionally, it investigates how such videos influence user interactions and emotions in YouTube comments. A group of master’s students from IfMK also contributed to the study.
The findings simultaneously support Andreas Schwarz’s work in a NASA task force that is currently collecting expert assessments for NASA’s astrobiology strategy for the next ten years (NASA DARES, Task Force 2).
Contact: andreas.schwarz@tu-ilmenau.de