National and Individual Determinants towards Science and Technology: Multi-Level Analysis of Coutries around the World

Nowadays the consolidated belief in the importance of science and scientific achievements for successful economic development and prosperity of society has been actively spread within the political and academic spheres of many countries.More precisely, the degree to which the general public recognizes and understands the essence of scientific and technological advances affects both economic and social well-being of individuals and society in general.The project focuses on examination of the basic aspects in the formation of attitudes towards science and technology among the world population. Differences between countries in relation to their attitudes towards science and technology nowadays are justified empirically, but one extremely important issue remains unclear - specifically, what factors underlie these distinctions.An inconsistency of approaches to reveal such factors let us to comprehend the necessity to develop unified «attitude-toward-science» model, which includes determinants of different levels - simultaneously macro and micro ones. The analysis combining factors of various hierarchical levels in one model had never been carried out before.The research is focused, mainly, on the examination of relationship between factors on different hierarchical levels and attitudes towards science and technology applying the quantative method namely multilevel modeling by regression equations. Using a data of World Value Survey (Wave 5) as an empirical base we were aimed to examine of relationship between various «micro-level» factors (social capital, individual values, religiosity, socio-demographic characteristics) and attitudes towards science and technology within countries and, secondly, to explain of the similarities and differences between them in terms of macroeconomic indicators (GDP and HDI). We managed to prove a link between the various components of social capital, religiosity, and a number of individual characteristics (income, gender, education, age) and attitudes towards science and technology at the individual level. Furthermore, we found differences between countries, which may be treated as a result of heterogeneity between countries in terms of their economic and social welfare expressed in the values of GDP and human capital.