IHSI Diversity Committee Monthly Resources
Each month, the IHSI Diversity Committee shares recommended reading and resources with the rest of IHSI staff. Curating and sharing these resources gives our team an opportunity to educate ourselves on various topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.
Over the past couple of years, we have found that our team appreciates the ability to learn more about a subject they knew very little about or even may not have been aware of.
As an institute devoted to promoting all forms of health, we want to share these resources more broadly with our campus and community stakeholders. We hope that you will find them as useful as we have.
December 2024
This month, Michelle Lore, IHSI’s REDCap Application Manager, shares resources on data bias in citizen science projects.
Citizen science (also called participatory science or community science) is a community-based research practice that was popularized in the 1990s and has grown in interest as access to technology has expanded. Citizen science has been lauded as a way to "democratize science" by giving non-researchers and non-scientists ways to contribute to collecting, classifying, and/or analyzing data. Citizen science is used in many disciplines, such as ecology, biology, geology, and astronomy. (There is also a federal database of citizen science projects.) However, more and more research has been produced showing that the people who contribute to citizen science datasets are not representative of the general population, tending to skew white, middle and upper-middle class, and geographically concentrated in specific areas. Using this data without addressing these biases can have detrimental effects on policy decisions, conservation efforts, and resource delegation.
If you have 5 minutes: Social inequities and citizen science can skew our view of the natural world
If you have another 5 minutes: Citizen Science Has a Diversity Problem, Experts Say. Now What?
If you have 15 minutes: The Demographics of Citizen Science Participation and Its Implications for Data Quality and Environmental Justice (This research is produced by Illinois researchers at the Prairie Research Institute! If you do not want to read the whole academic paper, I highly recommend scrolling to the graphs in the results section.)
If you have 1-2 hours: Data Ethics in the Participatory Sciences Toolkit (This is an interactive training.)