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Short Abstract

Do you know how many citizen scientists of your project participate after they have signed up to be a part of the project? We would like to know as well! There seems to be a lack in the reporting of these numbers, so we would like your input into our survey.

Abstract

We are interested in the participation response rates of Citizen Science projects, i.e. the number of people that participate after they have signed up for the project. In our case, participants registered to receive a measurement kit and were asked to carry out 1-5 water quality measurements. However, about half of the people who received a kit actually did the measurements. Fellow citizen science researchers considered this to be a relatively high percentage. However, such participation response rates are rarely reported in the literature. There is existing literature on the response rates of evaluation surveys that participants filled in or on the number of clicks on a link after the first information about the project. However, citizen science researchers do not seem to record the response rate of participants after signing up. In literature it is known how to motivate citizen scientists to participate, i.e. offering training, becoming part of a community or working on a cause. However, how to compare and test if these types of motivational measures result in more participants that will indeed perform their measurements if participation response rates are not published? We realize that this type of participation response rate is not applicable to all citizen science projects, for instance when there is an online form to fill in after doing a onetime measurement. So, we are interested in the type of projects where participants had to sign up beforehand and would like to collect your (unpublished) numbers, estimates, and ideas in our survey.