Reframing Trust in Citizen Science: Comparative Insights From Two German Initiatives

Citizen science (CS) is met with a range of expectations regarding trust-building that originate in policy frameworks and academic studies. These tend to understand trust as an outcome of participatory research. Adopting a different approach, our praxeological study examines trust as a context-dependent mechanism. Drawing on qualitative interviews, surveys, and document analysis, we analyze the experiences of project leads and volunteers in two contrasting German CS initiatives. Our comparative case analysis reveals that trust should be understood not as a desirable outcome, but as demands arising from collaboration objectives and contextual factors, and as practices that entail specific commitments from the actors involved. The contrast between standardized data collection in natural science and interpretative methods in health and educational research shows how methodological frameworks generate distinct trust demands. Examining research settings through the lens of trust while considering resource and power constraints exposes tensions between objectives for inclusion, knowledge production, and knowledge transfer. Moreover, interpersonal trust is built partly through critique of conventional research practices, challenging whether generalized trust in CS or in science constitutes an appropriate analytical frame for these situated practices.