We know citizen science is good for science. Now we want to know what it means for participants! The goal of this project is to better understand citizen scientists and why they participate in citizen science projects. By analyzing volunteers' attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors through a survey, we can better understand how people feel about their experience doing citizen science, and even how it might be affecting them. This research has broad implications for working out how citizen science fits into the broader field of "informal science learning." While there is a lot of research on the impacts of zoos, museums, parks and even film on how people think and feel about science and conservation, there is comparatively little research on the impact of citizen science. In this meta-project, we are interested in investigating how citizen science fits into this picture, and we're doing so using citizen science... to study citizen science! We hope you'll partner with us in contributing to this research project by taking one survey now, and a second, final survey in about 6 months. As soon as we finalize our results, we'll share the findings with all participants in this project! Also, note that those who complete these surveys will be entered into a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card.
Thank you for your partnership,
The Becoming a Planet Protector Team