In this blog post, Parenting Science Gang gives their top seven tips for making the most of Facebook, based on their experience establishing and running a two-year citizen science project. They also provide reasons this social media platform was the most suitable for their project and advice on how to deal with some of the challenges.
Parenting Science Gang was a two year project where groups of parents on Facebook chose questions they wanted answers to, and then, working with experts, designed and ran their own experiment to answer them. It's been described as user-led citizen science, or radical co-creation of research. This has led to seven different research projects, on everything from what's in breastmilk for older children, to the experiences of larger mums during pregnancy and birth, with five scientific papers so far.
In addition to this blog post, they provide a detailed description on how they used Facebook in their full evaluation report, see Methodology: Use of Facebook and Our Groups.
Hear the founder of Parenting Science Gang, Sophia Collins, speak about the project and the power of online engagement in the Mesh webinar: Engagement at a distance: Sharing lessons from experience.
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