Scientists have long acknowledged that scientific literacy is important for a knowledgeable, supportive, informed decision-making public (Sinatra et al. 2014). To develop scientific literacy among the public, researchers--particularly in Ecology (Follett and Strezov 2015), have widely cited citizen science as a tool to meaningfully engage the public, while also doing large-scale data collection (Bonney et al. 2009). Recent literature has acknowledged the fusion of citizen science and crowd-sourcing (Swan 2012); sharing superficial similarities in modes of participant engagement and motivation. Despite these similarities, there is a large disparity in actual engagement between crowd-sourcing and citizen science; suggesting that framing plays an important role in decisions about participation. Additionally, participant outcomes, in terms of beliefs about scientific practices and scientific trust, between these two project types has not yet been investigated. This project seeks to investigate the role of framing (citizen science versus crowd-sourcing) in public data collection projects in evaluating: 1) trust of project developers and data; 2) ideas about scientific practices; 3) motivation to contribute; and 4) project enjoyment. To answer these questions in the context of Ecological research, two tree-phenology project platforms were developed, framed as either a citizen science project or a crowd-sourcing project.
Results/Conclusions
Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and assigned at random the citizen science framed or the crowd-sourced framed project. Participants collected data on tree flowering in the spring and leaf drop in the fall, filling out a pre/post survey about their experiences. From the data we see an emergent significant pattern of greater trust and positive views about science post-participation from the citizen science participants versus the crowd-source participants. Interestingly though, participants from both the citizen science and crowd-source projects reported similar levels of enjoyment, perceived broader benefits to themselves, and willingness to participate in future similar styled projects. Additionally, within the citizen science project, individuals showed significant gains pre-to-post in scientific literacy metrics, positive views of science, and positive views about public participation in science. These gains were not reflected in the pre-to-post comparisons of the crowd-source participants. From these initial results investigating framing of public participatory research, we suggest that there are indeed differences in participant outcomes between citizen science and crowd-sourcing framing, and ecologists hoping to engage with the public should be explicit in their broader goals when developing these types of programs.