- You have technical expertise relevant to a local priority or existing relationships with a scientist(s) or scientific organization with relevant technical expertise,
- More data or information is needed to make an informed local policy decision,
- A community-serving organization is seeking scientific support on an important civic-related question.
Collaborating on Research
Science centers and museums can play a pivotal role in supporting the collection, interpretation, analysis, and dissemination of data and evidence to support decision making. Science engagement organizations can also connect communities with researchers, such as those working in academia or industry. Collaborating on research involves identifying and filling information gaps vital for civic decision making as well as lending resources and intellectual contributions to community-led research, often improving the perceived importance of this work among decision makers. These types of efforts will often use many of the same methods and strategies as community-driven citizen science projects, but with the explicit goal of generating usable information for civic and political decision-making contexts. By actively involving communities in the entire research process, from formulating questions to communicating results, science engagement organizations can contribute to the generation of meaningful, usable data centered around community needs. This collaborative approach ensures insights gained not only inform decision making but build power within communities and drive positive societal change.
Civic engagement in action
Beating the Extreme Heat in Richmond
Science Museum of Virginia and scientist partner lead community training on data collection.
The Science Museum of Virginia in partnership with Groundwork RVA, a nonprofit that engages youth in greening the city of Richmond, supported teens in gaining first-hand experience in understanding how different surfaces absorb heat, how this affects their neighborhood, and how to help their communities build resilience. Through the “Throwing Shade in RVA” program, students used infrared cameras and thermometers to explore the drivers of urban heat islands (paved surfaces like roads and parking lots) and their solutions (green infrastructure like trees and native plants). Science Museum of Virginia scientists collaborated with these students as well as Richmond community members, universities, and other nonprofits to explore the city’s heat island effect. The resulting collaboration framework—known as the NOAA Urban Heat Island Mapping Campaign—includes partnerships with local climate resilience nonprofits and engages community members in data collection and analyses. Their research found that urban heat disproportionately impacts neighborhoods that are home to marginalized communities. More specifically, these high heat vulnerability areas overlap with historically redlined areas, where housing policies denied African American and Latino/a communities access to home financing and generational wealth while concentrating environmental disamenities (aspects of a location that causes it to be less valuable, safe, attractive, etc.) like highways within them. Environmental groups routinely use these data to promote the creation of new green spaces, including five new parks in Richmond’s Southside. More than 70 cities have adopted this model of community-driven data collection to understand and address the impacts of urban heat islands.
Crafting Useful Research Questions
The types of questions whose answers best support civic engagement will often be specific to a local context and used for purposes such as improving understanding of an issue, coming to consensus on a solution, or convincing others to take action. When formulating an effective research question, you and your partners may want to consider:
- What do we know about this issue broadly? What do we know about the issue in our specific local context? What don’t we know about this issue?
- How has this issue changed or developed over time in our community? What history or context is important to know?
- Would our work benefit from collaboration with an outside researcher to better define and/or answer our question?
- What kind of information might be useful in making key decisions? What data or information will various decision makers or other interested parties need to weigh options or assess impacts?
- What kind of information might not be useful or might even be harmful to these communities?
Examine these considerations with your community partner and, when possible, other community members. By ensuring that a diversity of community members is involved in research question development, you can be more certain that you are asking a question that will be practically applicable, beneficial to the community, and address a community priority. You may also want to engage with local decision makers to better understand what information would most likely influence their decisions. In addition, consider working with scientific researchers to help your community define questions that can be answered with rigorous and accessible methods.
- Learn more about how to design research with community leaders: Fostering Community-led Research and Knowledge from the River Network outlines best practices from both researcher-led and community-led processes to gather and use community-generated data to effectively solve problems impacting communities.
Ethically Communicating and Disseminating Usable Conclusions
Community input and community leadership should not stop after data collection. In addition to facilitating research question design and high-quality data collection, science engagement organizations can play important roles in data analysis and visualization, ensuring that a research project’s outcomes meet specific community needs and avoid ethical pitfalls. To create transparency and cultivate trust, it is often advisable to share collected data with the community you are directly working with. Science engagement organizations can also act as conduits for disseminating data more broadly to advance the community’s civic priorities. As you consider sharing data gathered through community-led investigations, it’s important to consider potential ethical tensions and practical concerns, like the inclusion of personally identifiable information, geolocated datapoints, and/or risk assessments. Also consider what forms of data ownership (e.g., shared, open source, proprietary) best meet the community’s needs.
Sharing data involves not only providing access to scientific information but ensuring that data are presented in ways that are accessible and meaningful to the community you serve. Science engagement organizations involved in community-led research have a responsibility to ensure their partners and community members fully understand and endorse data analyses and dissemination implications. Responsibly communicating research results means ensuring conclusions and/or recommendations are developed in collaboration with the community before sharing with the appropriate decision makers. Even if technical experts lead data analysis, interpretation of conclusions should be cocreated by all involved parties. Science centers and museums can work directly with community partners to contextualize and interpret data, making them relevant to local civic issues and supporting communities in making informed decisions. Read more in our “Building Momentum and Refining Strategies” role for more ideas on how to share the results of your work.
- Learn more about ethical considerations for data: The Data Ethics in the Participatory Sciences Toolkit from the Citizen Science Association can help project leaders understand their role as data handlers in identifying, meeting, and/or balancing ethical obligations among participants, partners, science, and society.
- Learn more about ensuring equitable opportunities for data use: The FAIR Principles published in Scientific Data provide guidelines for creating and sharing Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data.
- Learn more about data sovereignty: The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance from the Global Indigenous Data Alliance expand principles outlined in FAIR (see bullet above) to include Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics to ensure data guidelines address historical contexts and power imbalances.
Making Insights Accessible Through Data Visualization
In addition to facilitating research question design and high-quality data collection, science engagement organizations can play important roles in data visualization. Data visualization is a powerful tool for transforming complex information into accessible and compelling insights. Understanding a community’s culture and context is fundamental to designing visualizations that are easy to interpret and resonate with community goals. For example, consider collaborating with community members to incorporate culturally relevant symbols, languages, and visual metaphors to ensure that data speaks directly to community experiences. Interactive visualizations provide an engaging way for communities and decision makers to explore and interact with data and foster a sense of exploration and ownership over the data. Using a narrative approach to data visualization will help tell a compelling story that humanizes the data and connects with the audience emotionally. Ensuring that visualizations are inclusive and accessible is essential. Science engagement organizations can prioritize designs that accommodate diverse audiences by taking visual impairments, readability, and language into account. By adopting accessible design principles, visualizations become tools for inclusivity.
- Learn more about choosing the right data visualization for your purposes: Data Visualisation Catalogue from data visualization specialist Severino Ribecca allows you to filter a library of different visualization techniques; it also includes a blog with additional guidance.
- Learn more about tools for creating data visualizations: Civic and Community Engagement Data Visualization and Presentation Tools from California State University, Northridge catalogues tools for creating infographics and other visualizations that may be especially useful when collaborating with community groups and local decision makers.
- Learn more about using Microsoft Excel to create data visualizations: How to Build Data Visualizations in Excel from Evergreen Data shares step-by-step directions on how to make data visualizations using Excel.
Civic engagement in action
Protecting Communities from Flooding
Participants at a Co-created Public Engagement with Science forum discuss housing in Durham, North Carolina.
Durham, North Carolina’s Museum of Life and Science partnered with the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association to create visualization tools for local urban flooding. These tools aimed to uncover and address data gaps between where flooding occurs and where it is being reported to foster new research questions, inform residents, and expand uptake of local flood reporting tools. Via community leadership and input, project partners learned that more data on current flooding issues was needed to identify reporting gaps, and more community involvement was needed to fill those gaps. The team also learned that future planning for climate change’s impacts on flooding was needed. Through initial efforts, the team established a longer-term collaborative project, CreekWatchers, which is a community-driven monitoring and advocacy group within creek-abutting neighborhoods that will pay community members to increase creek literacy, understand creek issues, and implement solutions.