In this piece of work, we collaborated with the language consultants Maslansky to explore the views, attitudes and reactions of members of the public with regards to common approaches and language used to communicate about genomics, with a particular focus on those groups traditionally excluded from or under-represented in genomics research.
Language matters. It plays a vital role in determining how public audiences perceive the relevance of a topic, whether they feel at ease and confident to discuss it, and think discussing it can make a difference. We conducted a series of focus groups with 100 participants who had different ethnic identities and were from very diverse walks of life. We asked them if there are any differences between ‘what we say’ and ‘what they hear’ when talking about genomics. We also explored the common framings that scientists use to talk about genetics and whether they could recommend any improvements on these.
The voices of some of the focus group participants appear in the main Only Human film made by Jonathan Barnbrook. The focus group outcomes were also used by Ketchum as a background for the Liming with Gran films.