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This paper investigated how environmental meaning-making is strongly influenced by participants' cultural backgrounds. However, participatory research often faces challenges in incorporating diverse knowledge systems within technoscientific innovation frameworks. The Horizon 2020 REGACE project aimed to tackle this issue by assembling an interdisciplinary research team along with local agricultural stakeholders from five countries: Israel and Palestine, Italy, Germany, Greece, and Austria. The project focused on understanding how cultural contexts shape deliberative processes related to sustainability and innovation. The REGACE project was guided by the question, “Innovation for whom, by whom?” (Davies, 2024). It examined whether technoscientific practices could genuinely support co-constructed empowerment. Citizen science was used not only as a methodological approach but also as an epistemic and organizational practice, positioning participants as knowledgeable social actors and critical interlocutors rather than passive data providers (Riley & Mason-Wilkeys, 2023). Farmers from energy self-sufficient social farms and ecovillages, along with local stakeholders involved in greenhouse-based photovoltaic innovation, contributed culturally embedded perspectives that helped articulate collective sustainability narratives. This article examines the methodological and epistemic roles of questionnaires and sentiment analysis within a qualitative-participatory research design. It proposes an integrative mixed-methods framework that analytically combines quantitative and qualitative forms of knowledge instead of keeping them methodologically separate. Drawing on Bryman's (2006) work on the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods, Scholz and Tietje’s (2002) embedded case study approach, and recent reflections on epistemic assumptions in mixed-methods research (Pilcher & Cortazzi, 2024), the study conceptualizes survey-based instruments as active components in the production of participatory knowledge. A six-language questionnaire, including both closed-ended questions and open-ended prompts, captured participants' perceptions, expectations, and feelings regarding socio-environmental change. Quantitative data were analysed to reveal patterns across the international research population, while sentiment analysis of textual responses identified emotional configurations and recurring themes. These analytical processes were interdependent, allowing for general trends to be understood within culturally specific meaning-making practices. Findings from the REGACE Project (Antonucci, Volterrani, Serra, Cornaro, Petitta, Bovesecchi, 2024; Volterrani, Antonucci, 2025) indicate that cultural positioning significantly shaped how sustainability, innovation legitimacy, and technological intervention were conceptualized. Distinct yet intersecting narratives emerged regarding the relationship between traditional agricultural knowledge and technological innovation, highlighting both convergence and tension across Mediterranean and Central European contexts. Within REGACE, questionnaires and sentiment analysis functioned as knowledge-producing instruments that actively informed the design and sequencing of subsequent participatory engagements, rather than as detached exploratory tools. This study contributes to methodological discussions in mixed methods and participatory research by examining how quantitative and qualitative instruments work together as complementary epistemic operations. It demonstrates that integrating survey-based tools can improve contextual understanding, align methodologies reflexively, and enhance analytical coherence. More broadly, REGACE illustrates how citizen science can meet the political and epistemic need for co-constructed empowerment in environmental innovation, supporting culturally relevant sustainability pathways within complex international research contexts.