What does the project involve?
The project team is hosting 2-3 evaluation sessions at each community garden, concurrent with usual community garden activities, to enable garden users to share their perceptions via audio and audio-visual recordings on a tablet, as they move around the garden. This qualitative data will be organised into themes and compared with other evaluation data (interviews and document reviews) collected by Wellbeing SA from local councils about considerations which informed the design of each community garden, to provide context for any recommendations they develop.
A primary consideration in the design of the citizen science evaluation sessions was to ensure the voluntary nature of participation in the citizen science evaluation for the community garden users and ease of participation, as these local councils have a higher proportion of people on low incomes or with low literacy.
Why did Wellbeing SA choose a citizen science approach?
Wellbeing SA has already worked on a separate citizen science project with the University of South Australia to obtain community members' perceptions of green space near their homes to share with local councils.
Wellbeing SA’s Strategic Plan 2020-25 includes a ‘strategic enabler’ of Community Engagement and Co-Design and the agency is keen to examine the feasibility and usefulness of citizen science approaches in public health as part of the suite of community engagement activity. The use of a citizen science approach in this project provided the opportunity to participate in TAPPC’s Citizen Science in Prevention project and learn from the experiences of other project partners.
Where is the project up to?
Ethics approval has been obtained for this project and all five data collection sessions with citizen scientists were completed at the end of October 2021. Wellbeing SA has collected the qualitative data from local council staff about the considerations which informed the designs of each of the community gardens in 2020/2021. Reports for the local councils and a visual representation for the two groups of community garden users are expected to be completed in December 2021.
What have you learnt so far?
Regardless of some challenges encountered in developing this project, this is a promising approach for empowering and informing people and there have been anecdotal comments from our citizen scientists to this effect. Early lessons from this project regarding the feasibility and usefulness of the citizen science approach, included:
- Sensitivities and concerns around physical and psychological safety can arise when taking a more 'proximal' focus on experiences of individuals. Citizen science may therefore be more feasible and/or acceptable to stakeholders when taking a more 'distal' or population-level focus (e.g. on environments)
- Recruiting citizen scientists through a third party (local council) adds complexities, and may be more efficient to recruit directly.
- Citizen science may be more efficient when conducted on a larger scale with broader recruitment of citizen scientists rather than an opportunistic approach to recruitment.
- Using automated or structured data collection methods may enable more efficient use of resources for data collection and analysis.