Gignac, FlorenceRighi, ValeriaToran, RaülErrandonea, Lucía PazOrtiz, RodneyNieuwenhuijsen, Mark J.Creus, JavierBasagaña Flores, XavierBalestrini, Mara2022-05-132022-05-132022Gignac F, Righi V, Toran R, Errandonea LP, Ortiz R, Nieuwenhuijsen M, Creus J, Basagaña X, Balestrini M. Co-creating a local environmental epidemiology study: the case of citizen science for investigating air pollution and related health risks in Barcelona, Spain. Environ Health. 2022 Jan 12;21(1):11. DOI: 10.1186/s12940-021-00826-81476-069Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/53073Background: While the health risks of air pollution attract considerable attention, both scholarly and within the general population, citizens are rarely involved in environmental health research, beyond participating as data subjects. Co-created citizen science is an approach that fosters collaboration between scientists and lay people to engage the latter in all phases of research. Currently, this approach is rare in environmental epidemiology and when co-creation processes do take place, they are often not documented. This paper describes the first stages of an ongoing co-created citizen science epidemiological project in Barcelona (Spain), that included identifying topics that citizens wish to investigate as regards air pollution and health, formulating their concerns into research questions and co-designing the study protocol. This paper also reflects key trade-offs between scientific rigor and public engagement and provides suggestions to consider when applying citizen science to environmental health studies. Methods: Experts created an online survey and analyzed responses with descriptive statistics and qualitative coding. A pop-up intervention was held to discuss with citizens their concerns about air pollution and health. Later on, a community meeting was organized to narrow down the research topics and list potential research questions. In an online survey, citizens were asked to vote for the research question they would like to investigate with the experts. A workshop was held to choose a study design in which citizens would like to partake to answer their preferred research question. Results: According to 488 respondents from the first survey, cognitive and mental health were the main priorities of investigation. Based on the second survey, with 27% of the votes from 556 citizens, the most popular research question was, "How does air pollution together with noise and green/blue spaces affect mental health?". The study design selected was an observational study in which citizens provide daily repeated measures of different cognitive and mental health outcomes and relate them to the air pollution concentrations. Conclusions: Based on the co-creation activities and the results obtained, we conclude that applying citizen science in an environmental health project is valuable for researchers despite some challenges such as engaging citizens and maximizing representativity.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-021-00826-8Air pollutionCitizen scienceCivic concernsCo-creation workshopEnvironmental healthEpidemiologyOnline surveyParticipatory researchStudy designinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess