Co-creation in citizen social science: the research forum as a methodological foundation for communication and participation

Citizen science has grown substantially in scope and visibility, traditionally rooted in the natural sciences but increasingly engaging social science questions and methods. The emerging field of citizen social science encompasses projects led by social scientists as well as citizen science initiatives focused on social issues, and spans a wide spectrum of citizen participation—from contributory data collection to co-created and citizen-led projects. Two long-standing participation perspectives frame this evolution: a democratization-of-science approach emphasizing public engagement and empowerment, and a top-down, scientist-led crowd science paradigm focused on large-scale data tasks. Within co-creational citizen social science, meaningful participation hinges on intentional communication among project partners throughout all research phases. The paper argues that the communicative spaces where this occurs require explicit methodological conceptualization to support safe, inclusive, horizontal exchange that centers citizens’ lifeworld concerns. Drawing on the communicative turn in social and political theory, the authors propose the research forum as such a framework and outline its characteristics and alignment with participation, transdisciplinarity, reflexivity, and impact. They then illustrate its application in a co-created project with multigenerational co-housing initiatives to examine community-building and democratic self-governance. The purpose is to articulate how a structured communicative methodology can enhance co-creation, ethical reflection, research design decisions, and practice-relevant outcomes in citizen social science.

The paper situates citizen social science within broader citizen science debates that distinguish democratizing, participatory research traditions from scientist-led crowd science models. It reviews participation typologies (e.g., contributory, collaborative, co-created; with an extension to citizen-led projects) and discusses the importance of co-decision-making throughout the research lifecycle. The literature emphasizes transdisciplinarity as a defining feature, integrating diverse stakeholders and lifeworld knowledge with scientific theories and methods while requiring ongoing reflection on positionalities and power relations. The authors draw on participatory action research (PAR) concepts such as communicative spaces to support collaborative knowledge production and hermeneutic traditions that foreground intersubjective understanding. They also review debates on impact—beyond academic outputs to social and political change—highlighting aims for socially robust, context-situated knowledge that bridges everyday practices and scientific generalization. Key sources include Habermas on public sphere and communicative action, Fraser on counter-publics, PAR scholarship (Kemmis and McTaggart), citizen science frameworks (Bonney et al.; Shirk et al.), transdisciplinarity (Maasen and Lieven; Fam et al.), and critiques of scholastic bias (Bourdieu).

Methodological framework: The research forum is conceptualized as a modular series of facilitated workshops that scaffold co-creation across all research phases: topic definition and co-design; data collection, analysis, and interpretation; and presentation and evaluation of results. Design principles include: a safe, inclusive, horizontal communicative space; explicit communication rules; strong but self-reflexive moderation by academic researchers; and openness to diverse qualitative and quantitative methods (e.g., focus groups, photovoice, multilog writing, surveys). Sessions are adapted in frequency, length, and format to project needs and foster a knowledge coalition among stakeholders. Application in practice: The framework was implemented in a co-created project with three self-organized multigenerational co-housing projects. Research questions focused on: (1) conceptualizing co-housing as a community beyond traditional bonds; (2) identifying characteristic community-building processes; and (3) describing democratic self-governance. Each project undertook a series of six workshops over one year (18 sessions total), involving 50 residents directly and 160 residents overall through peer-to-peer extensions. Sessions followed a six-step structure: (1) warm-up/check-in and agenda; (2) joint evaluation of between-session “homework” (e.g., biographical interviews); (3) thematic methods-driven exploration (e.g., posters, photos, role play); (4) communal break for informal exchange; (5) visioning and action planning; (6) closing summary, tasking, and methodological feedback. All sessions were audio-recorded; videos and photos documented group processes and materials. Data collection and participatory methods: Low-threshold, creative, and multi-modal techniques were employed to reduce barriers and include different ages (children, adolescents, adults, seniors). Methods included check-in rounds, meta-discussions on process, role play, visioning exercises (e.g., children’s “visionary thinking” and “opposites day”), peer-designed and conducted semi-structured “house interviews,” and seniors’ café interviews in-situ. Transcripts from interviews and workshops were iteratively brought back to the forum for joint analysis and interpretation. Moderation strategies addressed power asymmetries (turn-taking, explicit mandates, transparency of topics/outcomes, distributing responsibilities) while acknowledging the impossibility of complete neutrality. Ethics and reflexivity: The forum emphasized informed consent, data protection, intellectual property, and attention to positionalities, authority, and differing communication skills. The facilitation balanced inclusion with progress, regularly revalidating its mandate and ensuring co-researcher prioritization of topics. The approach aimed to decenter commonsense interpretations, foster reflective distancing from everyday routines, and surface power structures and conflicts for joint discussion. Outputs and documentation: All materials were shared with residents, including those absent, to extend the communicative space beyond workshops (e.g., peer interviews, surveys, feedback rounds). The process culminated in consolidated results, retrospective process evaluation, and identification of action steps within and beyond the communities.

- The research forum effectively operationalized co-creation by structuring safe, inclusive, and moderated communicative spaces across all research phases, aligning practice with participatory and PAR-informed methodologies. - Four key dimensions of co-researcher communication emerged as foundational: (1) opening up spaces for social encounters (trust-building, addressing emotional/task/organizational issues, decentering everyday assumptions); (2) establishing communicative practices (dialogic culture, explicit rules, transparency, and moderation to mitigate power asymmetries); (3) initiating social self-understanding (transforming first-order, subjective views into shared, generalizable definitions and action options); and (4) engaging in (counter-)public discourses (translating internal consensus into public and political engagement). - Practical implementation with three multigenerational co-housing projects (18 workshops over one year; 50 direct co-researchers; reach to 160 residents) demonstrated that the forum: (a) fostered consensus on community-building, decision-making, and conflict handling; (b) enabled inclusive participation through low-threshold, age-appropriate methods; (c) supported community-building but revealed participation gaps when residents did not attend; and (d) catalyzed external engagement (e.g., participation in urban policy events, advocacy for rental-based co-housing models, local community initiatives). - The process generated practice-relevant insights and produced both scientific and social impacts, including a handbook on community-building in multigenerational co-housing, and strengthened political agency for promoting solidaric, affordable housing commons.

The findings address the core aim of enhancing co-creation in citizen social science by demonstrating that a purposively designed communicative infrastructure—the research forum—can anchor participation, transdisciplinarity, reflexivity, and impact throughout a project’s lifecycle. By structuring inclusive dialogue, the forum supported co-decision-making on research topics and methods, enabled joint interpretation of data, and fostered community-building processes that are central to the studied co-housing context. Reflexive moderation and explicit communication rules mitigated (though did not eliminate) power imbalances, enabling marginalized perspectives to be voiced and integrated. The translation of subjective, situated perspectives into shared, generalizable definitions and action plans exemplifies the intended symbiosis between lifeworld knowledge and social science theorizing. Furthermore, the move from internal consensus to external (counter-)public engagement shows how citizen social science can contribute not only to academic knowledge but also to deliberative public discourse and policy influence. Overall, the forum advances methodological rigor in co-created social research by aligning epistemic aims (generalisable insights) with ethical and political commitments (democratization of knowledge production, socially robust outcomes).

The paper contributes a methodological foundation—the research forum—for communication and participation in co-creational citizen social science. It articulates design principles and practical procedures that (a) center co-researchers’ lifeworld perspectives from topic definition to evaluation, (b) facilitate transdisciplinary exchange, (c) embed reflexivity about positionalities and power, and (d) target scientific, social, and political impacts. Demonstrated in multigenerational co-housing projects, the approach yielded evidence-based, practice-situated knowledge, community-building actions, a publicly available handbook, and expanded engagement in public discourse. The authors recommend early and continuous inclusion via co-design and co-evaluation to sustain participation and relevance, acknowledging that ambitions for co-creation may sometimes stall. Future work could adapt and test the research forum across diverse social contexts and stakeholder constellations, refine strategies for including absent or less vocal participants, and further evaluate long-term social and policy impacts of forum-enabled co-created research.

- Participation gaps: Not all residents chose or were able to participate; active attendees gained a knowledge advantage over non-attendees, and materials could not fully substitute for five-hour, in-person sessions. - Format biases and power dynamics: The talk-heavy, academically familiar format advantaged highly articulate participants; despite rules and moderation, hierarchies and internal politics influenced consensus-building. - Moderator positionality: Facilitators could not be fully neutral; their outsider role helped balance interests but risked reinforcing academic–lay hierarchies. - Contextual constraints: One project lacked a communal space, requiring university-based sessions; seniors faced health/scheduling barriers; time constraints limited depth of full participation across phases. - Sample homogeneity and generalizability: Co-researchers were relatively homogeneous (many university-educated, social professions), which may limit transferability to more diverse settings. - Inclusion strategies: Despite low-threshold, multi-modal methods (e.g., peer interviews, children’s activities), achieving comprehensive inclusion across all age groups and factions remained challenging.