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BashTheBug on the Zooniverse News

Zooniverse volunteer study

You may have received this email from the Zooniverse Team and already taken part; if so, thank you. If not, please consider participating as the more volunteers take part, the better.

The Zooniverse is carrying out a study in collaboration with Horizon Digital Economy Research at the University of Nottingham, which aims to examine ways of assessing motivation and enhancing volunteer engagement with online citizen science projects. The work will examine the interaction between motivations, behaviour, and people’s enjoyment and satisfaction.

To do this we need your help! Your participation may help us to understand the psychological basis for motivation to take part in citizen science. This will help us to understand how to enhance benefits to volunteers, and increase engagement in citizen science, and science in general.

If you have taken part in any Zooniverse project in the last four weeks, completing at least one classification, we would like you to take part in an online questionnaire, which will take no more than 15 to 20 minutes of your time.

We will also ask for additional consent to link your responses to your Zooniverse data. You do not have to give us permission for this, and you can still take part in the questionnaire. If you also choose to give us access to your Zooniverse data, this will allow us to compare patterns of volunteer engagement and to converge these with reported motivations and experiences.

You must be 18 years old or over to take part.To take part in the study, please click here – https://nottinghampsych.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dbDJxlrw9l3fMMJ

Or for further information about the study, feel free to contact the lead researcher, Dr Liz Dowthwaite at liz.dowthwaite@nottingham.ac.uk.

By Philip Fowler

Philip W Fowler is a computational biophysicist studying antimicrobial resistance working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

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