Waterproofing Data Project: Evaluation Survey Results With School Students and Community Resident Volunteers, 2020-2021

The Waterproofing Data project explored how to build communities’ resilience to flooding, by engaging them in the process of generating the data used to predict when floods will occur. The project team developed a functional citizen-science mobile app prototype and a model school curriculum, which has been successfully co-produced and trialled with more than 300 students from over 20 schools and civil protection agencies of five Brazilian states (Acre, Mato Grosso, Pernambuco, Santa Catarina and Sao Paulo). The app and curriculum enabled the communities involved to democratise flood data, raise awareness of flood risks, and co-design new initiatives to reduce disaster risks to communities. Aiming to understand better the impact of our project, we gathered further quantitative evidence of improvement of knowledge about floods through an evaluation survey with school students and community resident volunteers after our data generation activities using the mobile app. This data set compiles the answers to an evaluation survey aiming at evaluating the knowledge improvement about floods derived from the Waterproofing Data Project. The data groups questions in 8 groups that cover flooding aspects related to housing, neighbourhoods, communication, and flooding features. Our analysis indicates the positive impact of data generation activities on the flood risk knowledge of participants. We analysed the group of users before (baseline, n=292) and after they participated in data generation activities (treatment, n=216). The percentage of participants who declared to have “sufficient”, “good” or “very good” flood risk knowledge after our pedagogical intervention (48%) was higher than before their participation (32%) and this difference was statistically significant (Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test, p < 0.0005, effect size, r = 0.324). No significant change has been observed in a control group of non-participants. The questionnaire and answers are written in Portuguese. This dataset is complementary data for our publication “Dialogic data innovations for sustainability transformations and flood resilience: The case for waterproofing data” available here https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102730