How do age, available support, gender and attitudes affect the quality of data collected by young citizen scientists in an ecological research project?

Abstract

Abstract1: Citizen science is increasingly used to collect ecological data. Specifically, participation of school students in authentic research has been suggested as having a multitude of benefits from data collection to science education. Nevertheless, the overall quality and quantity of data concerns ecologists who are using data for further analysis.2: I coordinate a citizen science project, the Helsinki Urban Rat Project where lower and upper secondary school students collect data on urban rat occurrence through the use of track plates that record rat footprints. Within the project, both the success and accuracy of participating young citizen scientists can be assessed by comparing their results by professional researchers’ results and due to the use of an additional questionnaire relate this to the background variables (i.e., age, gender, available support, attitudes and sensitivity to disgust).3: I found out that, in contrast to results from previous studies, age was not a significant variable, but rather available support and voluntary participation with rewards increased data quality. Additionally, higher liking of biology as a school subject was associated with the lower accuracy, whereas a higher interest in environment with higher accuracy.4: The young citizen scientists provided reliable data with the exception of overrepresented false positive observations. My results suggest that the quality and quantity of citizen-generated data are not straightforwardly dependent on the selected target groups. Citizen science activities should be planned by careful consideration of the context, for example the school strongly shapes the participatory activities.