Abstract
BackgroundWhile the health risks of air pollution attract considerable attention, both scholarly and within the general population, citizens are rarely involved in environmental health research, beyond participating as data subjects. Co-created citizen science is an approach that fosters collaboration between scientists and lay people to engage the latter in all phases of research. Currently, this approach is rare in environmental epidemiology and when co-creation processes do take place, they are often not documented. This paper describes the first stages of an ongoing co-created citizen science epidemiological project in Barcelona (Spain), that included identifying topics that citizens wish to investigate as regards air pollution and health, formulating their concerns into research questions and co-designing the study protocol. This paper also reflects key trade-offs between scientific rigor and public engagement and provides suggestions to consider when applying citizen science to environmental health studies.MethodsExperts created an online survey and analyzed responses with descriptive statistics and qualitative coding. A pop-up intervention was held to discuss with citizens their concerns about air pollution and health. Later on, a community meeting was organized to narrow down the research topics and list potential research questions. In an online survey, citizens were asked to vote for the research question they would like to investigate with the experts. A workshop was held to choose a study design in which citizens would like to partake to answer their preferred research question.ResultsAccording to 488 respondents from the first survey, cognitive and mental health were the main priorities of investigation. Based on the second survey, with 27% of the votes from 556 citizens, the most popular research question was, “How does air pollution together with noise and green/blue spaces affect mental health?”. The study design selected was an observational study in which citizens provide daily repeated measures of different cognitive and mental health outcomes and relate them to the air pollution concentrations.ConclusionsBased on the co-creation activities and the results obtained, we conclude that applying citizen science in an environmental health project is valuable for researchers despite some challenges such as engaging citizens and maximizing representativity.
Highlights
Poor air quality constitutes a serious health burden worldwide [1]
In a recent narrative review, we adapted this model from a general perspective and developed a four-phase framework with features that occur in different participatory practices in environmental health research: (1) identification, (2) design, (3) the deployment and
Along the lines of participatory research like the work of Wing et al [6], here, we present the initial phases of the Barcelona CitieS-Health project, an ongoing environmental epidemiology project in which citizens codesign with scientists a study to assess the link between air pollution exposure and health
Summary
Poor air quality constitutes a serious health burden worldwide [1]. In the last years, there has been an extensive body of research documenting established and new health effects associated with air pollution [2]. In a recent narrative review, we adapted this model from a general perspective and developed a four-phase framework with features that occur in different participatory practices in environmental health research: (1) identification (civic concerns are identified and translated into a research question), (2) design (data collection tools, data governance and other aspects of the study protocol are defined), (3) the deployment (data are collected and analyzed) and (4) action (results are transformed into practical citizenproduced knowledge to inform public policies) [11]. This paper reflects key trade-offs between scientific rigor and public engagement and provides suggestions to consider when applying citizen science to environmental health studies
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