Training youth citizen scientists to conduct qualitative open-ended interviews: methodological failure and hope at the dawn of Social Science 2.0

Ecologically focused social scientists have looked on with envy as their natural science colleagues, who already had the ability to quickly gather large datasets, have further increased the volume of data available to them... [ view full abstract ]

Ecologically focused social scientists have looked on with envy as their natural science colleagues, who already had the ability to quickly gather large datasets, have further increased the volume of data available to them through implementing the successful citizen science programs that make up Science 2.0. Social science techniques such as interviewing can be slower to administer and it usually takes a long time for a small number of researchers to gather datasets large enough to be seen as representative and robust. The widespread development of a Social Science 2.0, where citizens could be enrolled to conduct more interviews than researchers have typically thought possible, would be highly advantageous, as the current number of trained social scientists is globally not enough to collect the volume of information required to address the plethora of wicked issues afflicting society. This paper recounts the exploratory efforts of a group of sociologists investigating the socioecological impacts of climate change in the Turks and Caicos Islands to scale-up their data collection by training high school students to conduct interviews for their study. The quality of interview conducted by these high school citizen scientists, as well as of the data they collected, was measured against the best efforts of the sociologists, who conducted their own interviews using the same survey instrument. Content, thematic and discourse analysis of interview transcripts showed that the professional scientists outperformed the citizen scientists to the extent that it is questionable whether efforts to train the former in the first place were worthwhile. More broadly, the findings question the validity of any Social Science 2.0 project. However, citizen scientists in this study did discover small amounts of novel information that professional scientists did not, providing some impetus for renewed and re-structured attempts to make Social Science 2.0 work.