Unpacking what it means to be a citizen scientist: Toward a shared understanding for defining and measuring engagement

Within citizen science, accurately measuring engagement, i.e., what participants actually do on behalf of a project, is important for assessing participant experiences and outcomes, which may be significantly influenced by the... [ view full abstract ]

Within citizen science, accurately measuring engagement, i.e., what participants actually do on behalf of a project, is important for assessing participant experiences and outcomes, which may be significantly influenced by the degree or level of engagement. Across the field, measuring engagement remains somewhat simplistic, often relying instead on output measures such as the number of participants, rate of retention, the number of web page hits and downloads, and other baseline measures of recruitment, retention, and outreach. This has resulted in a lack of understanding about the ways and extent to which participants are engaged in self-directed citizen science projects.

The current work describes the first phase of a NSF-funded collaborative research project to define and unpack what engagement entails for adults participating in citizen science. Six projects were purposively selected to span the continuum of contributory, collaborative, and co-created projects. To initially characterize engagement, we worked with the six project leaders to develop a priori criteria for selecting a sample of participants who were likely to reflect the full range of engagement from high to low. Guided by sociocultural theories from the learning sciences, we conducted, coded, and analyzed data from 75 interviews that were then used to develop a metric to measure engagement levels among individuals across different projects. Results from this work will shed light on the complex dimensions of engagement in citizen science, as well as provide practitioners with a standard way to measure engagement. Phase two of this research will use the metric to facilitate cross-programmatic analyses between the projects to better understand the relationship between participant engagement and intended learning outcomes.