SUMMARY FOR ARTICLE

As science museums and centres broaden their practices to include the development of scientific citizenship, evaluation needs also to take account of this dimension of their practices. It requires complex methods to understand better the impacts of public participation in activities mediated by SMC, including their impacts on the governance of the SMC themselves. In recent years however science centres and museums are expanding their mission beyond informal science learning and they are becoming places that support the scientific citizenship of their visitors . Qualitative research has been widely used to assess dialogue and participation activities and it is so far the preferred choice to evaluate how science centres enable scientific citizenship. How this translates into effective methods for public participation in the governance of the science centre is subject to a number of factors which we are recently starting to study and understand .