TESS Network Motivation Survey

The TESS Network motivation 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.

The TESS Network Survey motivation study is part of the study about motivation in citizen science projects conducted within the ACTION project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5753092). The survey was designed and administered using the Coney toolkit.

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

• *-procedure.ttl contains the RDF representation of the structure of the conversational survey (questions, answers, etc.) using the Survey Ontology
• *-results.ttl contains the RDF representation of the answers collected using the Survey Ontology
• *-survey.tll contains a comprehensive RDF representation of the survey data using the Survey Ontology
• *-results.csv contains the CSV of the collected answers
• *-script.R is the R script developed to analyse the collected answers
• *-mean-var-motivating-questions.csv contains the computed mean and average for each question considered (observable variables)
• *-mean-var-motivating-factor.csv contains the computed mean and average for each motivation factor considered (latent variables)
• *-correlation-factors-global-motivation.csv contains the correlation analysis between each motivation factor and the global motivation 

A poster and a paper describing the study are additional resources referenced by the research object.