Understanding participants and their motivations
To open up learning opportunities effectively, practitioners must have an accurate picture of their intended audience, and understand their wants and needs. To support learning it is also important to understand participants’ prior knowledge and expertise. This can be challenging for citizen science practitioners, however, due to the diversity of participants, especially when they live so far apart.
By understanding why people participate, practitioners can find overlap between participants’ goals for participation and the projects’ scientific goals. In the context of environmental volunteering, there are detailed discussions in both Geoghegan et al. (2016) and Kragh (2016), which usefully differentiate between personal/self-directed and altruistic motivations as below.
Self-directed motivations:
A personal interest in the topic being studied
Desire to learn something new
Desire to discover something new
Desire to spend time in nature
Socialising with like-minded people
Altruistic motivations
Desire to volunteer for a cause
Wish to contribute to science
Feel it is important to help
There are several examples of citizen science projects that attempt to capitalize on motivation and interest. For example, the Old Weather project on the Zooniverse platform was created to elicit weather information from handwritten Royal Navy shipping logs, to help to improve reconstructions of past weather and climate across the world. Whilst the project was motivated by environmental research, it attracted participation from people interested in the real life stories and social history the writing revealed.
Motivation to participate should not be conflated with likelihood of achieving learning outcomes. This is exemplified in the data published on participants in the Space Warps project on Zooniverse - which found that participants who stayed on the project for a long time did not necessarily improve in the accuracy of their classifications (Marshall et al., 2016).Methods used to understand participants’ wants and needs include surveys, analysis of internet log files and interviews (Herodotou et al, 2020). There are some terrific resources available to help you elicit participants’ motivations. For example, the DEVISE scale on motivation to participate in citizen science measures motivations that range from interest and enjoyment to factors such as worry or guilt (Phillips et al., 2018). You can request the DEVISE evaluation instruments on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website.