Glyn Everett Glyn.Everett@uwe.ac.uk
Senior Research Fellow
Initiating and continuing participation in citizen science for natural history
Everett, Glyn; Geoghegan, Hilary
Authors
Hilary Geoghegan
Abstract
© 2016 Everett and Geoghegan. Background: Natural history has a long tradition in the UK, dating back to before Charles Darwin. Developing from a principally amateur pursuit, natural history continues to attract both amateur and professional involvement. Within the context of citizen science and public engagement, we examine the motivations behind citizen participation in the national survey activities of the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) programme, looking at: people's experiences of the surveys as 'project-based leisure'; their motivations for taking part and barriers to continued participation; where they feature on our continuum of engagement; and whether participation in an OPAL survey facilitated their movement between categories along this continuum. The paper focuses on a less-expected but very significant outcome regarding the participation of already-engaged amateur naturalists in citizen science. Results: Our main findings relate to: first, how committed amateur naturalists (already-engaged) have also enjoyed contributing to OPAL and the need to respect and work with their interest to encourage broader and deeper involvement; and second, how new (previously-unengaged) and relatively new participants (casually-engaged) have gained confidence, renewed their interests, refocussed their activities and/or gained validation from participation in OPAL. Overall, we argue that engagement with and enthusiasm for the scientific process is a motivation shared by citizens who, prior to participating in the OPAL surveys, were previously-unengaged, casually-engaged or already-engaged in natural history activities. Conclusions: Citizen science has largely been written about by professional scientists for professional scientists interested in developing a project of their own. This study offers a qualitative example of how citizen science can be meaningful to participants beyond what might appear to be a public engagement data collection exercise.
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Jul 22, 2016 |
Deposit Date | Aug 24, 2015 |
Publicly Available Date | May 17, 2017 |
Journal | BMC Ecology |
Electronic ISSN | 1472-6785 |
Publisher | BioMed Central |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 16 |
Issue | S1 |
Pages | 13 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12898-016-0062-3 |
Keywords | natural history, participation |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/918675 |
Publisher URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-016-0062-3 |
Contract Date | Sep 19, 2016 |
Files
art%3A10.1186%2Fs12898-016-0062-3.pdf
(1.2 Mb)
PDF
You might also like
Sustainable drainage systems: Helping people live with water
(2016)
Journal Article
An overview of municipal solid waste management in developing and developed economies: Analysis of practices and contributions to urban flooding in Sub-Saharan Africa
(2015)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Public perceptions of sustainable drainage devices
(2016)
Book Chapter
SuDS and human behaviour: Co-developing solutions to encourage sustainable behaviour
(2016)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search