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Astronomy Education Review / Volume 9 / Issue 1 / RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS

2010, AER, 9 (1), 010103, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/AER2009036

Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers

Published 18 February 2010

M. Jordan Raddick, Alexander S. Szalay, and Jan Vandenberg

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Georgia Bracey and Pamela L. Gay

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, Illinois 62026

Chris J. Lintott

Oxford University, Oxford, OX1 3RH United Kingdom

Phil Murray

Fingerprint Digital Media, Newtownards, Northern Ireland, BT23 7GY United Kingdom

Kevin Schawinski

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520

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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 have made more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this article, 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.

© 2010 The American Astronomical Society

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

astronomical surveys, astronomy computing, galaxies, Internet, Web sites, public outreach, galaxies, cosmology, research into teaching/learning, web-based learning

PACS

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

1539-1515 (online)

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef The American Astronomical Society

ARTICLE DATA

History
Received 01 June 2009
Accepted 24 August 2009
Published online 18 February 2010
Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/AER2009036

    References

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Figures (2) Tables (3)

Figures (click on thumbnails to view enlargements)

FIG.1
A screenshot of the Galaxy Zoo interface. Volunteers look at the galaxy in the center of the screen and determine its shape. They then click one of the six buttons on the right side of the screen to report their classification. Their report is written into a database and compared with the findings of other volunteers to create a database of galaxy morphologies

FIG.1 Download High Resolution Image (.zip file) | Export Figure to PowerPoint

FIG.2
(a) Number of days since the launch of GZ1 versus cumulative number of registered users. The large jump in users on day 394 corresponds to press coverage of the discovery of a new object called “Hanny’s Voorwerp” (Lintott et al. 200911). (b) Number of days since the launch of GZ1 versus cumulative number of volunteer classifications. The same large jump on day 394 also appears in the number of classifications

FIG.2 Download High Resolution Image (.zip file) | Export Figure to PowerPoint

Tables

Table I. Volunteers interviewed for this study. The table shows the interview code used by the authors, the type of interview (IM or Phone), and the interviewee’s age, gender, country of residence, and occupation (occupations were adapted from volunteer self-reports except where in quotes)

View Table
Table II. Initial categorization scheme for motivations developed by each rater. The table gives the rater’s name for the motivation category and a typical statement of motivation from that category. (a) Schema of rater #1, (b) Schema of rater #2, and (c) Schema of rater #3

View Table
Table III. Final motivation categories that arose during the interviews, selected after discussion among the three raters. The table shows the motivation category name as used by the research team and the one-sentence description of the category used in the survey.

View Table


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