The Diversity of Participants in Environmental Citizen Science

Abstract

Reported benefits of environmental citizen science include the collection of large volumes of data, knowledge and skills gained by participants, local action, and policy influence. However, it is unclear how diverse citizen science participants are, raising concerns about representativeness of data and whether individual, societal, and environmental benefits are evenly distributed. We surveyed 8,220 people representing a cross section of the population in Great Britain to ask whether they had participated in environmental citizen science, allowing us to examine who is and who is not participating. Using logistic regression, we examined relationships between demographic variables, and crucially the interactions between these variables, and the likelihood of participation and whether participation was repeated. Men were more likely to participate than women. People identifying as from white ethnic groups were more likely to participate than those identifying as from minority ethnic groups; participation by women from minority ethnic groups was particularly low. Participation by those from white ethnic groups declined with socioeconomic status, but this was not the case for those from minority ethnic groups. Participation was highest amongst those in education (studying at school, college, or university) and lowest amongst the unemployed. We recommend citizen science practitioners carefully consider the aims of projects and thus the diversity of participants they wish to attract. We discuss potential mechanisms for widening participation, for example, engaging participants through third parties already embedded in communities and providing a variety of tasks for people with different amounts of time and types of skills to offer. Finally, we encourage practitioners to document and publish participant demographics to monitor diversity in citizen science.

Variations in the Motivations of Environmental Citizen Scientists

“…People identifying as being from minority ethnic groups were overrepresented in these groups compared with the overall sample of survey respondents. This is in line with previous research, which has shown that people from minority ethnic groups are more likely to participate in citizen science when they are in education (Pateman et al 2021) and when they are recruited via direct requests to participate or through community representatives (Sorensen et al 2019).…”

“…Of these initial survey respondents, 613 individuals had participated in citizen science and were, therefore, asked about their motivations for participating. In the participant group, the proportion of people in different demographic groups was determined by both the makeup of the initial sample (i.e., representative of the wider population) and the propensity of different groups to participate in citizen science (see Pateman et al 2021).…”

“…We chose this approach because it gave us access to a large number of interviewees representative of the demographics of the population of Great Britain as a whole (Table 1). This was important for our initial aim of understanding who is and who is not participating in citizen science (described in Pateman et al 2021), and it also allowed us to explore motivations across environmental citizen science participants in Great Britain and how these vary between demographic groups. This method also allowed us to access people that targeted surveys of known citizen scientists can struggle to reach, such as those who no longer participate or those for whom project leaders do not hold contact details.…”

The Known Unknowns: What Citizen Science Projects in Germany Know about Their Volunteers—And What They Don’t Know

“…Increasingly, the citizen science community is formulating the demand and desire to make the group of participants from science and society as diverse as possible, e.g., [5,6]. Cooper et al (2020) have just brought the discussion about the claims to inclusiveness and terminology of citizen science into focus [7].…”

Beewatching: A Project for Monitoring Bees through Photos

“…CS combines the objective of informing and training the public on certain topics and providing data on that topic to the scientists. The advantage of CS with respect to “traditional science” is to allow the collection of a large amount of data over wide areas, which would otherwise not be possible if conducted by paid professionals [ 2 ].…”