The CS4Health Conference in Zurich in November 2025 was an inspiring event for 150 people to share their work and experiences on doing health research with people rather than on people.
Aiming to tackle global health issues, the evolving field of citizen science can contribute new modes of knowledge production by involving concerned citizens as collaborators in the research process. And attending conference participants engaged in deep discussions on aspects like stakeholder motivation, impacts of citizen science in health research, or the interface to governance bodies and political decision making.
Teresa Holocher, senior researcher from the ZSI (Center for Social Innovation), presented the citizen science activities of the InChildHealth project (www.inchildhealth.eu) to the highly interested audience. In the last 2 years, the EC-funded research project InChildHealth has involved more than 2000 pupils from 7 European cities in monitoring the indoor air quality in their schools and investigating how this links to wellbeing and health, together with a transdisciplinary team of researchers.
In the conference session Teresa shared the experiences of doing a proper impact assessment of the citizen science activities, making use of impact questionnaires for the involved children and interviews with the involved teachers. She shared lessons learned on the handling of evaluation data, the methodological approach and challenges encountered, as well as practical experiences made when working with so many pupils and teachers in different countries.
If you are interested in this topic and want to retrieve more information, please contact Teresa under holocher@zsi.at or visit the project website www.inchildhealth.eu.
