Motivations of Citizen Scientists Participating in Galaxy Zoo

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Scientific paper

Galaxy Zoo is an online citizen science project involving over 170,000 volunteers who have classified the morphologies of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. In this study, we examine the motivations of Galaxy Zoo participants - what reasons do they give for offering their time classifying galaxies?
Interviews were conducted with randomly-chosen participants, and the transcripts were independently analyzed to discover motivations for participation. A systematic method of classifying the motivations was used independently by each member of the research team. A list of 14 motivation categories was agreed upon by the researchers, and this list is presented here along with illustrative quotes from the interviews. Using similar methods of classification, motivations were also taken from the Galaxy Zoo Forum and compared to the motivations from the interviews. This technique can be generalized to study other populations of new media participants.
We find that data from the Forum supports the original classification scheme developed from the interviews, and we present details of a planned survey that will continue this research with a larger sample. Finally, we present some possible implications of these results on other citizen science projects, including upcoming Galaxy Zoo projects, and we outline plans for our own future research in this area.

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