Survey Study about Motivation for Participants in Citizen Science Projects

The survey study about motivation for participants in Citizen Science projects was designed within the ongoing H2020 project named ACTION (pArticipatory sCience Toolkit agaInst pollutiON). 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 and the structure of the survey proposed shuold be customised considering the topic of the activities.

This research object describes the studies performed within the ACTION project to investigate motivations of different citizen science communities: the TESS Network (https://tess.stars4all.eu/); the 6 ACTION pilots (https://actionproject.eu/citizen-science-pilots) Mapping Mobility, Open Soil Atlas, Water Sentinels, Restart Data Workbench, Wow Nature, Walk Up Aniene.
The surveys were designed and administered through Coney (https://coney.cefriel.com) and made available as linked data exploiting the Survey Ontology (https://w3id.org/survey-ontology).

The research object adopts the RO-Crate specification. Files made available within the research object are:

• *-procedure.ttl contains the RDF representation of the template structure of the conversational survey (questions, answers, etc.) using the Survey Ontology
• *-mean-var-motivating-questions.csv contains the computed mean and average for each question considered (observable variables) comparing all the surveys performed
• *-mean-var-motivating-factor.csv contains the computed mean and average for each motivation factor considered (latent variables) comparing all the surveys performed
• *-correlation-factors-global-motivation.csv contains the correlation analysis between each motivation factor and the global motivation comparing all the surveys performed

The Research Object also references all the RO-Crates describing the different survey motivation studies in details.