More productive relationships between policy, social science and citizens are needed to address complex policy issues, but they have often eluded the best efforts and intentions of those actors. Citizen social science is one approach being used to open up social science methods to members of the lay public. Citizen social science takes many forms, but, in essence, it is about greater hands-on involvement of lay people in scientific research: doing it, designing it, understanding it and debating it. Applied in the right way, citizen social science has untapped potential as a positive development in its own right, and as a tool for more direct policy use. Participatory approaches to both research and policy are designed to enhance research at the margins – whether this is with traditionally under-represented groups or sensitive, controversial and complex topics. An attraction of citizen social science is that it offers something that feels fresh and innovative and could grab the public interest. It is underused in social science directly related to public policy research, and new opportunities for creative policy problem solving arise from this gap.

Additional energy and resources are generated by wide involvement in discovery aimed at addressing complex collective problems. As well as this, it has potential for additional forms of expertise to be added to our grasp of complex policy choices. Societies are witnessing more decentralised, diffuse and engaged worlds in policy and governance, as well as policy spaces where citizens play ever-more significant roles in civic leadership. In this context, the integration of research into policy making demands that models for social science match these democratic innovations by sharing scientific knowledge beyond elites and specialist groups. Citizen social science is also emerging as a viable technique for discovery among hard-to-reach groups, helping groups with less formal power to be more clearly heard in research, and in policy making.

This chapter first sets out some context and basic descriptions for citizen social science, and how the method could relate to policy making. After a brief outline of how citizen social science links to other citizen engagement approaches, the chapter looks at practical issues for those considering doing a policy-related citizen social science project: options for levels and types of participation; whether and how the outputs and outcomes are affected by the nature of the participation; and what kinds of data it is feasible to collect.