CosmoQuest: Motivations and Needs of Citizen Scientists

At the core of citizen science is a community of people who volunteer their spare time and/or resources to the pursuit of science. In order to purposefully attract audiences to our projects, we need to understand what... [ view full abstract ]

At the core of citizen science is a community of people who volunteer their spare time and/or resources to the pursuit of science. In order to purposefully attract audiences to our projects, we need to understand what motivates people to do science instead of other (perhaps more enjoyable) tasks. In this talk we present the results of approximately 50 interviews of members of the CosmoQuest community. We explore through a grounded theory analysis the factors that motivated these volunteers to begin their participation, why they continue to participate (or not), and what aspects beyond science opportunities (e.g. social and educational activities) do or do not factor in.

These interviews use an instrument that parallels the interview instrument used in earlier research with Moon Zoo participants, and we will compare our results with the results of this earlier project that existed within a science-only environment. This will allow us to explore how the inclusion of materials beyond just the science projects and related forums may (or may not) allow us to attract participants with a more diverse set of motivations.

The results of these interviews will also be compared with the results of a larger scale online survey, thus allowing us to measure the frequency of different motivations in the broader community, and to explore how different factors of design effect different people.

Finally, we will study how motivation correlates with behavior by looking to see how people with different motivations use the site in various ways.