Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the motivations and demographics of Galaxy Zoo citizen science volunteers, developing a technique to analyze free responses and laying the groundwork for larger surveys to understand volunteer motivations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for extracting motivations from free responses and provides initial insights into volunteer demographics and motivations in Galaxy Zoo.

Findings

Development of a technique to analyze free responses

Initial demographic and motivation insights

Framework for future large-scale surveys

Abstract

The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this paper, we present results of a pilot study into the motivations and demographics of Galaxy Zoo volunteers, and define a technique to determine motivations from free responses that can be used in larger multiple-choice surveys with similar populations. Our categories form the basis for a future survey, with the goal of determining the prevalence of each motivation.