Audience Data and Research by Hadley, Steven; Johanson, Katya; Walmsley, Ben;

Short description:

This book presents a wide range of new audience studies research in the performing arts to provide a diversity of perspectives from scholarship, policy, management and practice. It was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Trends.

Long description:

This book presents a wide range of new audience studies research in the performing arts to provide a diversity of perspectives from scholarship, policy, management and practice. It explores the insights different methodologies, carried out with different kinds of audiences, can contribute both to our immediate understanding of audiences and to the future development of audience research.

The book showcases research across the myriad fields that contribute to audience scholarship, highlighting the ability of audience research to engage thinkers and practitioners, from across often falsely divided art forms and academic fields. Together in one volume, these different methodologies explore the potential complementarity of evolving approaches to audience research and provide an in-depth opportunity for investigating innovative methods. Focusing on the need to understand audiences in a deeper and richer way, this volume offers a crucible of thinking and re-thinking about how society understands the impact of arts and culture on audiences.

 Audience Data and Research: Perspectives from Cultural Policy, Arts Management and Practice serves as a catalyst to stimulate new critical debate on the potential of empirical audience research to provide fresh insights into questions of audience enrichment and cultural value. It will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of audience studies, media and cultural studies, performance arts research, arts management, and cultural policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Trends.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Reflections on Audience Data and Research  1. A prison audience: women prisoners, Shakespeare and spectatorship  2. Challenges of cultural industry knowledge exchange in live performance audience research  3. Using mixed-methods, a data model and a computational ontology in film audience research  4. SROI in the art gallery; valuing social impact  5. Arts audience segmentation: data, profiles, segments and biographies  6. The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums  7.  A possible teleology of cultural sector data in England  8. The coming crisis of cultural engagement? Measurement, methods, and the nuances of niche activities  9. Spontaneity and planning in arts attendance: insights from qualitative interviews and the Audience Finder database  10. Measuring the effectiveness of public subsidy by the analysis of disparate data sources: do subsidies increase arts participation by low engagers?