Contours of citizen science: a vignette study

Abstract

Citizen science has expanded rapidly over the past decades. Yet, defining citizen science and its boundaries remained a challenge, and this is reflected in the literature-for example in the proliferation of typologies and definitions. There is a need for identifying areas of agreement and disagreement within the citizen science practitioners community on what should be considered as citizen science activity. This paper describes the development and results of a survey that examined this issue, through the use of vignettes-short case descriptions that describe an activity, while asking the respondents to rate the activity on a scale from 'not citizen science' (0%) to 'citizen science' (100%). The survey included 50 vignettes, of which five were developed as clear cases of not-citizen science activities, five as widely accepted citizen science activities and the others addressing 10 factors and 61 sub-factors that can lead to controversy about an activity. The survey has attracted 333 respondents, who provided over 5100 ratings. The analysis demonstrates the plurality of understanding of what citizen science is and calls for an open understanding of what activities are included in the field.

Keywords: Citizen science; open science; vignette survey.

Figure 1.

An example of the survey layout.

Figure 2.

Characteristics of the survey respondents: (a) distribution of respondents across countries in which they currently live/work, (b) years of experience respondents have with citizen science and (c) role in which they are taking the survey.

Figure 3.

Number of vignettes rated by respondents. Red line indicates the median.

Figure 4.

How often each vignette was rated and the (a) role and (b) experience level of the respondents that rated each vignette.

Figure 5.

Overview of the ratings provided by the respondents: (a) degree of citizen science given by people over all 50 vignettes, (b) ratings depending on the level of confidence, (c) respondents’ confidence ratings and (d) degree of citizen science ratings per vignette—vignettes are ordered by their median rating.

Figure 6.

Vignettes with tendencies for significance and significant differences in ratings based on (a) respondents’ experience and (b) confidence.

Figure 7.

Respondents’ (a) confidence and (b) its correlation with the ratings of the different vignettes.