Abstract
Science podcasts are increasingly prominent in public-facing science communication, but little is known about how listeners evaluate their credibility under everyday audio conditions. This exploratory qualitative study used a shared episode from a German public-service science podcast and three focus groups with ten adults. The transcripts were analyzed using deductive-inductive structuring qualitative content analysis. Participants’ accounts were organized around two functionally distinct but related dimensions. The affective-closeness dimension captured relational responses associated with voice and prosody, narrative self-disclosure, direct address and interaction, and familiarity through repeated listening. The cognitive-transparency dimension captured participants’ perceptions that communicative features supported access to evidence, epistemic status marking, and structural orientation. Participants often related approachable, relational communication to the expectation that the basis and status of scientific claims could be located and examined when needed. The findings do not establish that credibility consists of these dimensions or that a particular balance between them produces credibility. Rather, they support a context-bound, empirically grounded interpretative model of credibility evaluation in the shared-stimulus setting. The study further derives a preliminary, listener-informed checklist for reflective podcast production and publication. This heuristic requires validation across audiences, genres, topics, production settings, and cultural contexts.