Participant Information: PerceptEarth Survey

You are invited to participate in the PerceptEarth Survey, conducted by the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki.

The study examines how people experience pleasant and unpleasant public outdoor places and how accurately computational models can represent these experiences.

The survey is open to adults aged 18 or older who can identify public outdoor places that they have personally experienced.

Participation does not require you to be a resident of the city you evaluate. We will ask whether you are a resident and, if applicable, how long you have lived there.

You will be asked to:

• Enter the name and country of a city you know.
• Mark at least five pleasant and five unpleasant public outdoor places on a map.
• Rate how pleasant or unpleasant each place felt.
• Select one or more fixed reasons that contributed to your experience.
• Answer a small number of background questions: residency, length of residence, nationality and age group.

The survey takes approximately 7 minutes.

Only mark public outdoor locations that you have personally experienced. Do not mark your home, another private address or a location that could identify a specific person.

We want the survey to represent genuine experiences. The application records limited information about how map points are created: the map zoom level, when each point was placed and saved, whether map search was used, whether the marker was moved before saving, and how long the point questions took to answer.

These data are used to identify incomplete, automated, duplicated, randomly placed or otherwise unreliable submissions.

Quality indicators support a researcher’s review. A response is never rejected because it disagrees with the PerceptEarth model.

Please contribute only locations based on your own experience. Submissions that appear random, automated, duplicated or deliberately misleading may be excluded from the research and will not be eligible for the optional raffle.

Participation is voluntary.

You may decide not to participate, stop before submission or skip the optional raffle without any negative consequences.

After final submission, your response can be removed on request only while it can still be connected to you. Once the identifying link has been deleted, it is no longer possible to locate and remove an individual response.

There are no foreseeable risks in taking part, provided you follow the instructions: mark only public outdoor places and do not mark your home, another private address or any location or information that could identify a specific person.

You may not receive a direct personal benefit from participating. Your responses help researchers evaluate and improve methods for representing people’s experiences of urban environments.

There is no payment for participating.

After submitting at least five valid pleasant points and five valid unpleasant points, you may optionally provide an email address for a later raffle.

Each approved, completed survey receives one raffle entry. Adding additional points does not provide additional entries.

Raffle eligibility is determined after the research team completes its data-quality review.

The raffle is separate from the research. You may complete the survey without entering the raffle.

The data will be used for scientific research, analysis, academic publications, presentations and research communication.

An anonymised version of the dataset will be made openly available for research purposes. It will not contain email addresses or anything that links a response to you.

Individual participants will never be named.

University of Helsinki
Digital Geography Lab
Department of Geosciences and Geography, Digital Geography Lab, University of Helsinki

Research contact:
PerceptEarth research team
perceptearth-project@helsinki.fi

Principal investigator:
Milad Malekzadeh
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Geosciences and Geography, Digital Geography Lab
perceptearth-project@helsinki.fi

For questions about the study, contact: perceptearth-project@helsinki.fi

For questions about processing personal data, see the Privacy Notice.