Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX, 77030, USA.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, 220N Lincoln Tower, 1800 Cannon Drive, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Sep 27;11(1):19119. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-96743-4.
"Citizen science" refers to the participation of lay individuals in scientific studies and other activities having scientific objectives. Citizen science gives rise to unique ethical issues that stem from the potentially multifaceted contributions of citizen scientists to the research process. We sought to explore the ethical issues that are most concerning to citizen scientist practitioners, participants, and scholars to support ethical practices in citizen science. We developed a best-worst scaling experiment using a balanced incomplete block design and fielded it with respondents recruited through the U.S.-based Citizen Science Association. Respondents were shown repeated subsets of 11 ethical issues and identified the most and least concerning issues in each subset. Latent class analysis revealed two respondent classes. The "Power to the People" class was most concerned about power imbalance between project leaders and participants, exploitation of participants, and lack of diverse participation. The "Show Me the Data" class was most concerned about the quality of data generated by citizen science projects and failure of projects to share data and other research outputs.
“公民科学”是指业余人士参与具有科学目标的科学研究和其他活动。公民科学引发了独特的伦理问题，这些问题源于公民科学家对研究过程的潜在多方面贡献。我们试图探讨公民科学实践者、参与者和学者最关心的伦理问题，以支持公民科学的伦理实践。我们使用平衡不完全区块设计开发了一个最佳最差标度实验，并通过美国公民科学协会招募的受访者进行了实地测试。受访者被展示了 11 个伦理问题的重复子集，并在每个子集中确定了最关心和最不关心的问题。潜在类别分析显示出两个受访者类别。“人民的力量”类最关心项目领导人和参与者之间的权力不平衡、参与者的剥削以及缺乏多样性参与。“给我看看数据”类最关心公民科学项目生成的数据质量以及项目未能共享数据和其他研究成果。
