Abstract
The bulk of research on citizen science participants is project centric, based on an assumption that volunteers experience a single project. Contrary to this assumption, survey responses (n = 3894) and digital trace data (n = 3649) from volunteers, who collectively engaged in 1126 unique projects, revealed that multiproject participation was the norm. Only 23% of volunteers were singletons (who participated in only one project). The remaining multiproject participants were split evenly between discipline specialists (39%) and discipline spanners (38% joined projects with different disciplinary topics) and unevenly between mode specialists (52%) and mode spanners (25% participated in online and offline projects). Public engagement was narrow: The multiproject participants were eight times more likely to be White and five times more likely to hold advanced degrees than the general population. We propose a volunteer-centric framework that explores how the dynamic accumulation of experiences in a project ecosystem can support broad learning objectives and inclusive citizen science.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 651-663 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | BioScience |
Volume | 72 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 1 2022 |
Keywords
- Conservation
- Crowdsourcing
- Education
- Public science
- Volunteer management
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Agricultural and Biological Sciences