Workshop Report WG 4: Motivation of participants in Citizen Science projects
Date: 14/03/2018 – 15/03/2018
Location: Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Hosts: Assaf Shwartz and Liat Levontin
Participants
Ana Rotter, Anne Land, Assaf Shwartz, Egle Marija Ramanauskaite, Hannah Grist, Liat Levontin, Loreta Tauginienė, Nirit Lavie Alon, Silvia Winter, Simon Etter, Zohar Gilad, Arminas Varanauskas
Summary of Workshop Days
Day 1 | 14.03.18
Participants introduced themselves, their citizen science projects, and their expectations from the workshop. We then had three short presentations.
- Arminas presented a project called CIMULACT, in which citizens participated in workshops about the future of Europe (Horizon 2020).
- Hannah Grist presented a citizen science project called "Capturing the Coast" which deals with marine biodiversity in the UK coast.
- Simon Etter talked about the CrowdWater project that examines whether citizens can observe what models need.
Liat Levontin gave a presentation about motivation – its definition as a process and the types of motivations (i.e., change, cooperation, competition and conservation). Liat explained basic motivation theories – Maslow's, Vroom's, and Locke & Latham's theories.
The goal of hands-on part was to get a feeling of the process of building a CS motivation questionnaire. Participants worked in teams and went over some of the database of relevant papers and harvested motivation items from the papers. Following, Liat presented the top-down motivation theory and its categories based on Schwartz's personal values theory. Liat explained how to categorize the items according to Schwartz's categories. In the second hands-on part, each team grouped their previously harvested items into categories.
Day 2 | 15.03.18
First, teams received feedback about their categorization work. Then, in two groups, participants used the feedback to enrich and improve their categorizations. Next, Liat demonstrated how to create questionnaire items from the categorized harvested items, e.g., how to create a few questionnaire items that well represent the many harvested items. Following, the groups practiced this process. Next, participants evaluated the complete questionnaire, and discussed the similarities and differences between the items in the questionnaire and the items created by the teams.
To conclude the workshop, we discussed best ways to use the questionnaire to collect data. We also discussed cultural and language differences and the need to modify the items for different languages and different projects. Liat also recommended a way to translate the questionnaire using reverse translation by 3 judges with proficient level in both languages.
Presentation for Download
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Varanauskas_Motivation for Participation CIMULACT case.pdf
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Grist_Scottish Association for Marine Science.pdf
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SimonEtter_Approach for Assessing Data Requirements of Citizen Science Projects for the Example of.pdf
Report for Download
