Parallel Session 6: Wednesday 10 April 10:15 - 12:00
Participatory science is a method of undertaking scientific research where the public can be meaningfully involved in the development and progression of research projects with science and technology professionals. Participatory approaches in the realm of science communication is becoming an increasingly common approach for individual researchers, groups and institutions to engage citizens with science rather than simply communicating research.
While participatory projects do not require fundamentally different evaluation techniques from other types of projects, there are some considerations that make participatory projects unique when it comes to their assessment. Amongst others:
- Participatory projects require people to do something for them to work, which means evaluation must focus on participant behaviour.
- Participatory projects are not just for participants. It is important to define goals and assess outcomes not only for participants, but for organisers, volunteers and non-participating audiences as well.
- Participatory projects are process-based and usually long-term, they often benefit from incremental and adaptive measurement techniques. If you are going to work with community members for three years to design a new programme, it’s not useful to wait until the end of the three years to evaluate the overall project.
In this session, Dr Edward Duca (science and innovation communication lecturer, University of Malta) and Simone Cutajar (researcher and Esplora Natura Director) will discuss some evaluation techniques they have used to evaluate small and large-scale science communication projects—focused on participatory approaches. Their experience ranges from formulating large-scale world-wide standardised evaluation for festivals to nation-wide citizen-led participatory projects. During this talk, they will discuss how institutions/individuals may choose the most appropriate measurement tools to evaluate the impact of their participatory projects by reflecting on case studies of some evaluation strategies that worked and others that didn’t quite work.
