The authority of scientific medicine in the era of controversies over clinical research – AMES

Medicine continues its scientification. This is particularly the case in the field of clinical research, which crystallises this alliance between medicine and science.
However, since the 1990s there has been an increase in the number of public controversies concerning health issues, particularly in relation to clinical research. There is also a strong public distrust of the pharmaceutical industry, of the authorities responsible for regulating the products resulting from this research and of these products, such as vaccines. These controversies and public attitudes have been widely interpreted as reflecting a crisis of confidence in scientific medicine and in science in general.
The public image of clinical research and the trust in both its actors and the products that result from it have consequences on many issues: compliance public health recommendations, treatment observance, the use of alternative medicines, recruitment in clinical trials, support for research policies...
The aim of this project is to jointly analyse the public image of clinical research and public attitudes towards it, and to clarify their relationship. In particular, it tests the theory of the crisis of confidence in scientific knowledge in the medical field by taking as an entry point the central role of clinical research, whose publicity, especially during controversies, raises the question of the relationship between healthcare, science and politics.

We will mobilise the contributions of three sociological research traditions: 1) the sociology of science, which allows us to understand the diversity of ways in which scientific issues are discussed publicly and ordinary relationships to science; 2) political sociology, which allows us to analyse how topics (such as clinical research) emerge in public debates as well as how this may affect public attitudes; and 3) the sociology of health, which reminds us that clinical research is intimately linked to care and forces us to pay attention to the specificities of medical issues and to the relationships that people have with the healthcare system.

Our approach will combine three complementary empirical operations.
1) We will produce a systematic mapping of the public treatment of clinical research in the general news media since 2005 as well as focus on the treatment of certain topics on Twitter and in the Assemblée Nationale. This work will provide a better understanding of the information landscape in which different segments of the public are immersed.
2) We will produce three questionnaire surveys conducted among representative samples of the French population and analyse existing but under-analysed surveys. This work will allow us to identify the social profiles associated with the different dispositions towards clinical research as well as the factors explaining the differences in perception.
3) We will conduct interviews with people participating in clinical trials, i.e. the public most directly concerned by this research. This approach, based on a specific public, will make it possible to approach the role of the contexts of interaction with the care and research system in the formation of attitudes and the way in which they interact in practice with the dispositions identified thanks to (2) and the public treatment of these questions (1).

This project will inform the public health community about how to build trust with the public. It will contribute to current international debates on the evolution of attitudes towards science. It will consolidate a line of research at the interface between the social sciences, public health and pharmacology on the public’s relationship with medicine and drugs.