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This methods paper describes a new UK-wide citizen science project, the Schools' Air Quality Monitoring for Health and Education (SAMHE) project, which is exploring indoor air quality (IAQ) in schools. Central to the project is a Web App, where school teachers and pupils can see air quality and environmental data from their classroom, learn about the significance of the data that their monitor collects, enter important contextual information to support data analysis by researchers, and are supported to do their own experiments related to air quality. School use of the SAMHE Web App is essential to the project's aims to 1) improve understanding of air quality in schools; 2) empower teachers and pupils to make informed decisions about management of their classroom environment, including ventilation; and 3) support the UK's next generation to think differently about air quality. Therefore, it is critical that the SAMHE Web App was co-designed with schools, to maximise its acceptability within schools, and to ensure that teachers and pupils engage with it. This paper describes the co-design process used within SAMHE, how co-design has helped shape the web app (including overall theme, visualisation of data, and supporting materials), and some lessons learned from the process that will be useful for future software development and citizen science projects with schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen science has a problem with engaging diverse participants, with a growing number of studies showing those most marginalised in society, who could benefit most from citizen science activities, are the least likely to participate. The full implications of this lack of diversity for what citizen science can achieve remains unexplored. To do this, we reviewed the literature to create a comprehensive list of 70 proposed benefits, outcomes, and impacts of citizen science. We used this list to construct 9 pathways to impact, showing how short-term project outcomes under the themes of data, participant engagement and collaboration lead to a suite of medium- and long-term outcomes. We then explored how a lack of diversity in citizen science participants can cascade through these pathways, affecting the overall ability of citizen science to achieve its myriad potential impacts and further entrenching disparities in society. We advocate for project leaders to use a pathways to impact approach to explore how who they recruit will affect what their projects can achieve. We also call for greater imagination in exploring, testing, and sharing ways in which barriers to participation can be understood and overcome to open citizen science up to all and to achieve its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding motivations is important because appealing to and fulfilling motivations helps citizen science projects recruit and retain participants. We summarise the literature around motivations, drawing on key theories from volunteering more broadly and building on this with additional motivations identified in studies of citizen scientists. We also examine what is known about differences in motivations between demographic groups. We then report on a survey of 613 environmental citizen scientists in Great Britain; they were asked to select from a list of motivations derived from the literature. We used hierarchical cluster analysis to group respondents by types of motivations held. Two clusters were dominated by people holding Values motivations (concern for others or the environment), both of which had high proportions of older people and people identifying as from white ethnic groups. A third cluster included people with Egoism motivations (participating to learn something or further one's career) and Values motivations. This cluster had a higher proportion of some commonly underrepresented groups than the overall sample, including younger people, people identifying as from minority ethnic groups and people in lower socioeconomic groups. Two further clusters also had higher proportions of people from minority ethnic groups than the overall sample, one dominated by those who participated because they were asked to, and the other by people who held other motivations not in our list. We use insights on participant motivations from the literature and survey to make recommendations to those wishing to recruit and retain citizen scientists, particularly those from underrepresented groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reported benefits of environmental citizen science include the collection of large volumes of data, knowledge and skills gained by participants, local action, and policy influence. However, it is unclear how diverse citizen science participants are, raising concerns about representativeness of data and whether individual, societal, and environmental benefits are evenly distributed. We surveyed 8,220 people representing a cross section of the population in Great Britain to ask whether they had participated in environmental citizen science, allowing us to examine who is and who is not participating. Using logistic regression, we examined relationships between demographic variables, and crucially the interactions between these variables, and the likelihood of participation and whether participation was repeated. Men were more likely to participate than women. People identifying as from white ethnic groups were more likely to participate than those identifying as from minority ethnic groups; participation by women from minority ethnic groups was particularly low. Participation by those from white ethnic groups declined with socio-economic status, but this was not the case for those from minority ethnic groups. Participation was highest amongst those in education (studying at school, college, or university) and lowest amongst the unemployed. We recommend citizen science practitioners carefully consider the aims of projects and thus the diversity of participants they wish to attract. We discuss potential mechanisms for widening participation, for example, engaging participants through third parties already embedded in communities and providing a variety of tasks for people with different amounts of time and types of skills to offer. Finally, we encourage practitioners to document and publish participant demographics to monitor diversity in citizen science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much can be at stake depending on the choice of words used to describe citizen science, because terminology impacts how knowledge is developed. Citizen science is a quickly evolving field that is mobilizing people's involvement in information development, social action and justice, and large-scale information gathering. Currently, a wide variety of terms and expressions are being used to refer to the concept of 'citizen science' and its practitioners. Here, we explore these terms to help provide guidance for the future growth of this field. We do this by reviewing the theoretical, historical, geopolitical, and disciplinary context of citizen science terminology; discussing what citizen science is and reviewing related terms; and providing a collection of potential terms and definitions for 'citizen science' and people participating in citizen science projects. This collection of terms was generated primarily from the broad knowledge base and on-the-ground experience of the authors, by recognizing the potential issues associated with various terms. While our examples may not be systematic or exhaustive, they are intended to be suggestive and invitational of future consideration. In our collective experience with citizen science projects, no single term is appropriate for all contexts. In a given citizen science project, we suggest that terms should be chosen carefully and their usage explained; direct communication with participants about how terminology affects them and what they would prefer to be called also should occur. We further recommend that a more systematic study of terminology trends in citizen science be conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]