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. 2020 Jan 13;5(1):2.
doi: 10.5334/cstp.248.

What Do We Know about Young Volunteers? An Exploratory Study of Participation in Zooniverse

Christothea Herodotou  1 , Maria Aristeidou  1 , Grant Miller  2 , Heidi Ballard  3 , Lucy Robinson  4
Affiliations

What Do We Know about Young Volunteers? An Exploratory Study of Participation in Zooniverse

Christothea Herodotou et al. Citiz Sci. .

Abstract

Citizen Science (CS) is an increasingly popular activity enacted either in the field or online. Volunteers participate in research activities such as data processing and analysis by, for example, identifying plants and animals. In this paper we examine young people's participation in online CS projects hosted on the Zooniverse platform. This is an exploratory study, the first of its kind that focuses on young people, mainly 16-19 years old. It uses data analytics and visualisation techniques to capture participation in online CS, and in particular to answer the following questions: (a) What does young people's participation look like in CS projects? (b) What Zooniverse projects do young people choose to participate in? and (3) What Zooniverse projects do young people choose together? Findings revealed five distinct engagement profiles characterising young people's participation and identified certain projects as been more popular across participants. Implications for the design of online citizen science projects targeting young people are discussed.

Keywords: Citizen Science; Zooniverse; online participation; young people.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Dendrogram showing the participants of the study (the “visitors” category is excluded).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Similarity between clusters (bottom line) and within clusters (top line).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Box-plots presenting differences amongst the four clusters. (Note: “51” indicates one participant who did not fit in any of the clusters.)
Figure 4
Figure 4. Engagement profiles of young people in Zooniverse.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Examples of participants from each cluster (Q = Quarter of a year; e.g., 2015 Q3 = third quarter of 2015).
Figure 6
Figure 6. Allocation of Zooniverse classifications amongst participants.
Figure 7
Figure 7. The 11 most popular Zooniverse projects that young people joined analysed by gender.
Figure 8
Figure 8. Number of task types within each cluster (most popular projects only).
Figure 9
Figure 9. Zooniverse projects chosen together by participants.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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