By Catherine Wilson, Sarah Mills, and Paul J. Wood.

Read the full paper here.

Environmental citizen science is the engagement of the public in environmental research. Whilst adults are most frequently engaged in citizen science, there has recently been increased interest in engaging children and young people. This article examines stakeholders’ perceptions and experiences of child engagement by examining two key measures of success, data quality and participant outcomes.

Twenty-six participants from ten different stakeholder roles were interviewed to provide an in-depth understanding of this topic. This paper found that most interviewees were positive about engaging children in environmental citizen science, having equal trust in the data collected by adults and children. This finding is important as child-collected data is expected to increasingly come under scrutiny as engagement with children and young people becomes more popular and visible within the citizen science community. When engaging children, in comparison to adults, interviewees thought that it was important to consider the purpose of the project (e.g. education or science), safety concerns, supervision, children’s knowledge and cognitive abilities, their attitudes and behaviours, and the children’s commitment to the project.

Data analysis of the interview material identified seven key outcomes that stakeholders understand children (and adults) gain from participating in environmental citizen science. These outcomes are educational, environmental, scientific, well-being, societal, social, and career benefits. These results have been developed into a novel framework, presented in this paper, which is a clear step forward for the scientific and practitioner community in recognising the range of outcomes that stakeholders perceive children can gain from environmental citizen science. This builds on previous frameworks which have focused on the benefits gained by adult citizen scientists. Overall, this study provides an in-depth examination of important themes surrounding stakeholders’ perceptions of engaging children in environmental citizen science.