How can citizen science reduce psychological distance to science? Insights from three projects in contested environmental contexts

Practical recommendations from a multi-perspective needs and challenges assessment of citizen science games

Citizen science games are an increasingly popular form of citizen science, in which volunteer participants engage in scientific research while playing a game. Their success depends on a diverse set of stakeholders working together–scientists, volunteers, and game developers. Yet the potential needs of these stakeholder groups and their possible tensions are poorly understood. To identify these needs and possible tensions, we conducted a qualitative data analysis of two years of ethnographic research and 57 interviews with stakeholders from 10 citizen science games, following a combination of grounded theory and reflexive thematic analysis. We identify individual stakeholder needs as well as important barriers to citizen science game success. These include the ambiguous allocation of developer roles, limited resources and funding dependencies, the need for a citizen science game community, and science–game tensions. We derive recommendations for addressing these barriers.

Citizen science in environmental and ecological sciences

Citizen science is an increasingly acknowledged approach applied in many scientific domains, and particularly within the environmental and ecological sciences, in which non-professional participants contribute to data collection to advance scientific research. We present contributory citizen science as a valuable method to scientists and practitioners within the environmental and ecological sciences, focusing on the full life cycle of citizen science practice, from design to implementation, evaluation and data management. We highlight key issues in citizen science and how to address them, such as participant engagement and retention, data quality assurance and bias correction, as well as ethical considerations regarding data sharing. We also provide a range of examples to illustrate the diversity of applications, from biodiversity research and land cover assessment to forest health monitoring and marine pollution. The aspects of reproducibility and data sharing are considered, placing citizen science within an encompassing open science perspective. Finally, we discuss its limitations and challenges and present an outlook for the application of citizen science in multiple science domains.

Civic, Citizen and Grassroots Science: Towards a Transformative Scientific Research Model | Request PDF

Request PDF | On Jan 1, 2013, Jessica McCallum Breen and others published Civic, Citizen and Grassroots Science: Towards a Transformative Scientific Research Model | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

Peer Production in Citizen Science: A Community-Centered Approach on the Example of Personal Science

Citizen science encompasses a wide range of practices where online collaboration for knowledge production plays a significant role. However, the study of forms of online collaboration other than crowdsourcing in citizen science has remained largely unexplored. This thesis aims to fill this gap by investigating peer production as a form of collaboration in online citizen science communities of practice. First, peer production theory was operationalized as a working model and used to analyze collaboration in citizen science case studies. This was followed by a comprehensive participatory design process for a specific use case involving the personal science community of practice. This process resulted in the creation of the “Personal Science Wiki”, an online space for consolidating community knowledge through peer production. Subsequently, a usability and card sorting study identified and resolved issues with the wiki implementation, and provided insights into mental models and content requirements regarding self-research knowledge. The lessons learned from the participatory design process were generalized as process recommendations for designing peer production solutions and knowledge management systems with communities of practice.

Why Do We Call It Participatory Science? | Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

A Vision of Metascience

How does the culture of science change and improve? Many people have identified shortcomings in core social processes of science, such as peer review, how grants are awarded, how people are selected to become scientists, and so on. Yet despite often compelling criticisms, strong barriers inhibit widespread change in such social processes. The result is near stasis, and apathy about the prospects for improvement. People sometimes start new research institutions intended to do things differently; unfortunately such institutions are often changed more by the existing ecosystem than they change it. In this essay we sketch a vision of how the social processes of science may be rapidly improved. In this vision, metascience plays a key role: it deepens our understanding of which social processes best support discovery; that understanding can then help drive change. We introduce the notion of a metascience entrepreneur, a person seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science. We argue that: (1) metascience is an imaginative design practice, exploring an enormous design space for social processes; (2) that exploration aims to find new social processes which unlock latent potential for discovery; (3) decentralized change must be possible, so outsiders with superior ideas can't be blocked by established power centers; (4) ideally, change would align with what is best for science and for humanity, not merely what is fashionable, politically popular, or media-friendly; (5) the net result would be a far more structurally diverse set of environments for doing science; and (6) this would enable crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments. For this vision to succeed metascience must develop and intertwine three elements: an imaginative design practice, an entrepreneurial discipline, and a research field. Overall, it is a vision in which metascience is an engine of improvement for the social processes and ultimately the culture of science.

Breaking the silence

Research on science communication has largely focused on teaching scientists how to describe their studies in ways that interest the public while deepening their understanding of scientific exploration. However, there is another, often overlooked side to science communication—how scientists respond when questions arise about the integrity of their research. Often, the tendency has been to stay silent and wait for any controversy to pass or be resolved in professional forums. But in an age of growing, intense attacks on science, silence can be detrimental to both public trust and the careers of scientists who are under scrutiny. For better or worse, journalists, social media professionals, and the public may take a response of “no comment” as a concession that the critics are correct, so forthright communication about research questions is more urgent than ever.

Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted

Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps stress the role of ideology: when people perceive scientists of a particular discipline to be ideologically like-minded, they tend to trust them more. Here, we report two findings: first, trust gaps between disciplines also exist in France—a representative sample of the French population (N = 1012) trusted researchers in biology and physics more than researchers studying climate science, economics, or sociology. Second, the more precise and consensual participants perceive scientific findings to be, the more they tend to trust the scientists (across and within disciplines). While these findings are correlational, they align with a non-ideological explanation of trust in science: the rational impression account. This account proposes that people can come to trust scientists by relying on basic cognitive inference processes, which tend to be generally rational.

From risk to flourishing: Seeds for responding to a complex world

Flourishing is the actualization of all beings toward their good -- not only individually but collectively, answering the question of `how do we live well with and for each other?'. In science as in society, the tendency to reduce, segregate, specialize, and settle has precluded embracing the concept of flourishing as a guiding principle. We aim to identify an approach to risk science research that promotes the flourishing of socio-ecological-technological systems (SETS). We discuss the normative role of an orientation toward flourishing for the field of risk science. We explore the possibility that (risk) science could be done in a way that is capable of pointing society toward a different future, one more resilient and more capable of flourishing. Our exploration mirrors the conversational nature of flourishing itself: examine ideologies traditionally believed to be rigidly in opposition and consider what emerges in the space(s) and conversation between them. We call this a dialectical approach. Within this paradigm grounded in conversation, pluralism, and pragmatism, we revisit three longstanding tensions in risk science: physical$|$social, determinism$|$uncertainty, contextuality$|$generality. Although these tensions are not new, revisiting them together through the lens of complexity science, and with explicit attention to the normative commitments that shape risk research, reveals underexplored possibilities for the field. Examining them in conversation with the other allows us to explore the provisional seeds for what might be termed complex risk science: interdependence, responsivity, participation, pluralism, openness, and ongoingness. Enacting the dialectical paradigm towards a risk science for a flourishing world will depend on creating collectives toward complex risk science, supporting them with skillfully governed commons, and centering care in our research.

Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor: A Manifesto and Examples for Implementation

Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be informed by (a) a wider base of aggregated knowledge, (b) contributions from a diverse scientific community, (c) participatory input from stakeholders, and (d) better responsiveness to ongoing changes in the state of knowledge.

What could a human right to participate in science be?

Abstract. At first sight, the idea of a human right to participate in science may seem absurd. Many assume science must be the preserve only of those with

The Problem With Promoting ‘Gold Standard Science’

Opinion | Branding scientific research with a simplified label risks misleading the public and harming scientific literacy.

The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other

The need for an integrated social constructivist approach towards the study of science and technology is outlined. Within such a programme both scientific facts and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs. Literature on the sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies is reviewed. The empirical programme of relativism within the sociology of scientific knowledge and a recent study of the social construction of technological artefacts are combined to produce the new approach. The concepts of `interpretative flexibility' and `closure mechanism', and the notion of `social group' are developed and illustrated by reference to a study of solar physics and a study of the development of the bicycle. The paper concludes by setting out some of the terrain to be explored in future studies.

Science as Collective Sensemaking

What is Science?