Community Operational Research and Citizen Science: Two icons in need of each other?

Abstract

Citizen Science attracts a lot of positive attention and a convenient alignment with it might offer multiple benefits for Community Operational Research. But what would be the basis for such an alignment? Could it offer important reciprocal benefits for Citizen Science? We address our first question by conducting a systematic comparison of Community Operational Research and Citizen Science to reveal points of commonality and difference between the two. Having established the basis for alignment, we then address our second question by exploring how alignment might be realised at micro, meso and macro levels. Through this exploration, we highlight opportunities for Community Operational Research to avail itself of Citizen Science's proximity to policy makers, and we make available to Citizen Science some approaches from Community Operational Research for structuring issues and dealing with contestable knowledge claims.

The SMART Framework: Integration of Citizen Science, Community-Based Participatory Research, and Systems Science for Population Health Science in the Digital Age

“…This foundational strength of community-based participatory research can result in symbiosis with citizen science in the realm of population health science, as there is considerable alignment between these 2 research approaches [38]. To translate citizen science into community voices that could potentially inform and influence policies [24], it is imperative that citizen scientist endeavors are structured using community-based participatory research principles, where citizens co-design studies and cocreate knowledge with researchers by contributing to all aspects of the research process [24,39].…”

Invisible brokers: “citizen science” on Twitter

“…Much has been written on whether participatory research should qualify as proper science or not [Cohn, 2008]. As the corpus of literature on the engineering of participation in non-scientific fields grows, bridges can be built to better understand the situation of citizen science [Gregory and Atkins, 2018] and the roles play by its brokers in it. It would be interesting to shift the focus from the comparison between citizen science and professional science to a comparison between scientific and non-scientific forms of volunteering, in terms of participation engineering and the role social media play in this engineering.…”

Supporting self-organised community research through informal learning

“…This is not the case. What is true is that the emphasis has shifted from the role of information collecting/gathering to the role of enabler/facilitator and narrator/critical friend (also see Gregory and Atkins, 2017, who discuss a similar transition in the context of Citizen Science, and what Community OR practitioners can learn from it). This continues a research tradition similar to Freire (1972) and Gaventa (2011),…”