Citizen Social Science: New and Established Approaches to Participation in Social Research

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which the roles of citizens and researchers play out in the social sciences. This is expressed by numerous overlapping and related terms, such as co-production and participatory action research, to name but two, and by the different social topics that citizen social science draws attention to. The key question this chapter seeks to explore is what does naming citizen social science as such bring to the fields of citizen science and the social sciences? The chapter explores the different epistemic foundations of citizen social science and outlines the development and provenance of citizen social science in its broadest sense, reflecting on how it is currently practised. It draws on different examples from the experiences and work of the authors and notes the boundaries and overlaps with citizen science. The chapter also highlights some of the key issues that citizen social science gives rise to, emphasising that while citizen social science is a relatively new term, its underlying approaches and epistemic foundations are at least partially established in the social sciences.

Quantitative conservation geography

“…However, there is an as-yet-vacant niche for established global citizen science platforms to improve documentation of threats (e.g., unsustainable use) to biodiversity, and of conservation responses. Furthermore, citizen social science [68] approaches offer new opportunities to account for social processes when investigating where, when, and what conservation actions should be implemented to support sustainable people-nature interactions through, for example, participation and mutual learning between stakeholders [69]. Public participation geographic information systems and citizen social science can provide an important means of collecting spatially explicit social data (e.g., about the values people associate with biodiversity, places and land-use preferences, therefore indicating their support or conflict over where conservation actions should be implemented).…”

Can Citizen Science in the Humanities and Social Sciences Deliver on the Sustainability Goals?

“…One factor that is weighted higher in this study is "Partnerships to achieve the goals". This has to do with the fact that many of the projects are so-called "Future Cities" ("Zukunftsstadt"), a BMBF funding program 4 for the development and implementation of sustainable spatial development concepts with a strong emphasis on citizen participation. There, mainly alliances of municipalities, business and civil society organizations have been established -hence the grouping here to this specific SDG.…”

“…The first stream includes works that contrast CSS primarily as a method for knowledge generation with CSS as an approach for additional objectives, such as the democratization of science, scientific quality assurance, or real experiments [4], [21]. The characteristic of social science research, namely to make complex social phenomena explicable, represents a particular contribution of interdisciplinary Citizen Science or CSS [5].…”

“…While much of Citizen Science takes place in the technical and natural sciences [3], CS that is situated in the humanities and social sciences -Citizen Social Science (CSS) -is increasingly receiving attention [4]. This also has epistemological reasons: "social sciences and humanities help understanding the human dimension and open a broad methodological spectrum for enriching scientific research with new approaches and for boosting public participation" [5].…”

Missed marks: This is no longer the 20th century

“…The stakeholders of science have not expanded, they have exploded. Everywhere on earth, people constantly interact with new knowledge, and when given the chance of a conducive environment, inconspicuous techies make contributions to widely used free and open-source software and hardware that elsewhere could be awarded a master's degree, high-schools command reagents and join cutting-edge drug discovery and synthetic biology research, math enthusiasts collaborate across the globe with professional mathematicians in solving some of the toughest problems, indigenous peasants document and share knowledge and biological material 2 (Albagli et al, 2015;Kothari et al, 2019), and the social sciences equally face a turn towards situated and participatory research (Albert et al, 2021). Science communication broadcasts proliferate, with massive followings, and recent US opinion polls show decent levels of trust in science, which may vary significantly across issues, but where a majority of people align with scientific standards of trust when it comes to funding sources, peer review and transparency (Funk, 2020).…”