CIVICA RESEARCH – Citizen social science and opening up research

Citizen social science and opening up research

We review the key issues and many useful approaches to solving them evolved across the different forms of open citizen social science.

A key component of open social science (OSS) is to bring the voices of non-professional stakeholders and research ‘subjects’ fully into the undertaking of research, a broad participatory approach best covered by the term ‘citizen social science’. It has three different but inter-related rationales:

• Extra hands to the pump. Many tasks in the social sciences and humanities (and indeed in some STEMM sciences like ecology or even astronomy) cannot be fully automated. Involving large numbers of non-professional volunteers in collecting data, making observations, recording experiences, coding materials, and making translations has huge potential to expand the feasible scope of research, especially using web-enabled apps and programmes.
• Participatory research improves methodological rigour, boosts accuracy and reduces the scope for distorting researcher ‘power’ biases that can otherwise be hard to appreciate or address. Involving research ‘subjects’ as co-participants from the outset in surfacing and designing questions, evolving measurements and indices, and commenting on played-back research results and findings requires careful handling, but done well can greatly strengthen the robustness and replicability of research.
• Specific normative rationales inform some key forms of citizen social science, such as improving individual and community capacities in development research; research encouraging peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; ‘decolonizing’ legacy research approaches used by western universities to study colonial people/areas or other historically disadvantaged groups; or deliberative democracy’s push to enhance the scope for reaching more consensual mutual understandings of how best to resolve policy choices and designs.

Committing to open access publishing also provides a capstone element for citizen social science projects.

We review the key issues and many useful approaches to solving them evolved across the different forms of open citizen social science.

Thu, 9 March 2023

12:00 – 13:00 CET

Register here