TESS Network Motivation Survey

The TESS Network Survey research object (RO-Crate) contains several resources related to the survey study on motivation of the TESS photometer hosts including the conversational survey structure and the data collected administering the survey.  

The study was conducted within the ongoing H2020 project named ACTION (pArticipatory sCience Toolkit agaInst pollutiON) on citizen science. Volunteers participate to citizen science initiatives for multiple reasons: personal enjoyment, desire for improvement or achievement, establishment of personal relationships, care for the environment, etc.

Studying motivation and investigating the factors influencing people participation to citizen science projects is an essential aspect in the analysis of citizen science communities. Understanding the reasons that foster people to engage can support the successful design and implementation of effective participant involvement tasks, as well as pave the way for long-term engagement.

The goal of the study is to analyse the motivation to participate of a specific citizen science community focused on fighting light pollution: the network of around 120 hosts of the TESS photometers. Volunteers of this network accepted to host and install sensors to monitor sky brightness in order to collect data for measuring the level of light pollution in many areas of the Earth.
The volunteers are very diverse: professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, light pollution fighters, astronomical outreach (museum, planetarium, dark sky association, etc.), astro-tourism actors, public administrations and others.

Files made available within the research object are:

• conversational_survey_TESS-network.ttl contains the RDF representation of the conversational survey using the Survey Ontology
• results_survey_TESS-network.ttl contains the RDF representation of the answers collected using the Survey Ontology and referring entities defined in the structure of the conversational survey
• results_survey_TESS-network.csv contains the CSV of the answers collected
• results_analysis_TESS-network.csv summarises the results of the analysis performed on the collected data and correlations.R is the associated R script used to compute it

Additional resources are referenced by the research object: the poster describing the study and the Coney toolkit used to design and administer the survey.