What is genuine participation in the context of design practice? Genuine participation is often considered the missing element that differentiates a successful participation project from an unsuccessful participation project. But what, exactly, does genuine mean and, more importantly for research purposes, how can the ‘genuineness’ of participation be measured? The present study is a first step to explore a possible metric for genuine participation. To begin, a questionnaire developed from six key topics of focus within participatory design research was created and administered to university design students. The results, analysed by a principal component analysis, yielded statistically reliable, strong, and otherwise clear and coherent patterns. These patterns were then qualitatively interpreted. The results indicated that intrinsic motivation, participation self‐efficacy and positive group affect can serve as reliable metrics for measuring the quality of the participation experience. It is proposed that future research into genuine participation consider the impact of these three variables.