Demographics of Public Participation in Science: A Meta-Analytic Approach

Abstract

Citizen science, defined here as the voluntary participation of the public in scientific research, has been proposed as a method of increasing diversity in science. However, it is unknown whether citizen science participants are truly more diverse than traditional (i.e., academically trained) scientists. In this paper, we conducted a meta-analysis of citizen science participant demographics (for gender, race/ethnicity, retiree participation, age, and education) across English language peer-reviewed literature in the Web of Science (WOS) database. We collected data encompassing 151,854 unique within-project participants from 157 projects. By pairing a subset of our data confined to North America (n = 21 projects) with geographically compared census data, we found that citizen science participants are disproportionately white and educated, with high variation in gender of participants across projects. The geographically compared results also suggested that participants are primarily adults. We then used linear modeling to explore whether project attributes, including publication year, scientific focus of the project (project focus), and whether the project is online or hands-on (project access), explain variation in demographics (n = 121 projects). We found an increase in female participation over time, while biodiversity projects had higher participation from white and retired people than health projects, and online projects had more female and educated participants than hands-on projects. However, only ∼7.5% of citizen science papers we reviewed reported demographic data, suggesting a need for more representative data. This research suggests that there may be room for increased participation from groups that are currently underrepresented in citizen science.