Eyes on our City: A Citizen Science Project
Citizen Science is a means to make our anthropological research more relevant and higher impact, by involving non-scientists as collaborators to do research at scale. Eyes on the City is our way of testing new models for Citizen Social Science. Working alongside our global health majors, we have been recruiting social scientists and testing the accuracy of their social observations. So far, the project has engaged over 150 local citizens as citizen social scientists, using downtown Tempe as our test bed.
Project Details
Citizen scientists can potentially help scale data collection and dissemination. While widely applied in the natural sciences, the social sciences haven't found as many ways to effectively harness this potential asset. One of the fundamental challenges in the extent to which citizen social scientists can accurately capture social phenomena to scientific standards. We have been testing how citizen scientists observed social context by using transect walks with systematic observation, identifying how such factors as gender and ethnicity impact what people record. Data collection was completed in late 2018, and we are currently coding data for analysis.
Research Team
- Cindi SturtzSreetharan, ASU
- Alissa Ruth, ASU
- Alexandra Brewis Slade, ASU
- Amber Wutich, ASU
- Charlayne Mitchell, ASU
- Collin McGuire, ASU
- Sara Rodriguez, ASU
Funding
This research project is currently open to funding opportunities. For more information, please reach out to the project lead listed above.