Trust. It seems trust in institutions is in short supply nowadays. At least, that's the conventional wisdom. But is it true?

The Pew Research Center regularly shares data on how much Americans trust various institutions, and the real picture is  murky. In spring 2016, they found high levels of trust for the military and scientists, but not for the news media, business leaders, or elected officials. Additionally, only half of Americans trust most or all of their neighbors (my review of The Vanishing Neighbor may shed some light on this).

But what about museums?

This winter, AASLH asked me to find out by updating the trust findings from The Presence of the Past. Since I was sampling for trust in history museums, I decided a contextual knowledge against peers would be helpful; I also sampled trust in "museums" and in "science museums and centers." The results were heartening.

But trust is a fragile thing. Indeed, that 2016 data from Pew feels rather like the distant past, as politically and socially so much has changed since then. Content presented by museums can be contentious (think climate change, Confederate monuments that "belong in a museum," long-term overt and systemic racism, cultural appropriation, and more). Should we take a position on critical issues of our day, especially when presenting "just the facts" neutrally is also a position that may not be tenable? What about multiple viewpoints? All of them? Even the abhorrent ones? Or do we choose? What does that mean for trust?​

These questions are increasingly on my mind, and I don't have answers. But benchmarking museum audiences, and the broader American public, is crucial so that we know what to expect from visitors and the public when we make individual interpretive decisions. This is work for which there is a crying need, so that museums can continue to maintain high levels of trust going forward.

​More to come.

All good research yields even more questions.

And so it was with my 2017 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers and broader population sampling. So many questions.

How do museums, and lifelong learning, fit into busy schedules? Why are individuals and families so siloed today? How can museums help? What else can we learn about The Parent Bubble? And what impacts do people (museum-goers but also the broader population) attribute to museums? (For more on what led me to these questions, check out the 2017 essays on The Data Museum or my PDF Research Releases and Data Stories.)

To begin to answer these questions (and yield more, of course), 14 museums partnered with me to field the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, as well as a broader population comparison sample. (You have already seen me share a key tidbit on curiosity.)

The surveys:

• The 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers is a survey of museum-goers, not casual visitors or the broader public.  This winter, there were 6,153 respondents, with 54% coming from art and history museums, and 46% from children's museums and science centers.  This breakdown was close to ideal, as it is a relatively even balance of two very different groups of visitors with very different motivations for visiting.  
• Broader population comparison sampling was fielded concurrently with the Annual Survey in order to provide a comparison sample. The broader population comparison sampling had 1,394 respondents from across the country, with only a quarter reporting visiting a museum at least once in the previous year.

Research goals:

In particular, the surveys focused on the following themes:

• Leisure time. Since museums are very much a leisure-time activity, it is helpful to see how they fit into leisure time. How do we compete with errands? Children’s activities? Binge-watching Netflix series? And how do all the obligations and things competing for our time affect our stress levels? After all, visiting a museum shouldn't be stressful, but fitting it in probably is.
• Parents of young children. As a field, we make assumptions about parents. We know science centers receive more families as visitors than art museums, so we assume visitation shifts have happened. And their generally lower assessment of museums indicates visiting museums is work. But we’ve never actually measured some of these assumptions.
• Museums, community, and sense of place. The 2017 survey told us that these individuals are highly engaged in their communities … or want to be, in the case of young adults. This led to a number of additional hypotheses to test, but given the constraints of an actual survey, I have to bite off one that these respondents will be able to answer in only a question or two. This year, I’m focusing on how museums contribute to a community’s sense of place. I’m saving the more complex questions for future research.
• Value of museums.
  • Part 1: In 2017, I ended the survey with an open-ended question about the value of museums. For 2018, I took the most common and/or important responses gleaned from that question, and developed a series of questions to first assess what percentage of museum-goers had experienced each outcome, and then the relative value of those experienced outcomes.
  • Part 2: In the 2017 survey, one respondent mused, “Can you imagine a world without museums?” Great question, so I included it.
• Benchmarking current audiences of museum participants. Individual museums rely on this work to make a current assessment of their museum's audience, who that primary audience is, and the attitudes and preferences of that primary audience. Participating museums in both 2017 and 2018 have begun tracking their results over time, for even greater insight. (See below for how you can do likewise in 2019.)

Research Releases:

As in 2017, I'll be releasing research findings in short essays on The Data Museum, and then pulling essays together by theme for release as PDFs for those who prefer that format. I'm deep in data right now (early April), but expect the essays to begin posting regularly within a few weeks.

And now, two additional notes:

• Future Annual Surveys and opportunities for your museum to benchmark and participate: I hold dear the idea that research for the field, about the field, should be shared with the field. But that only works when museums work together to make it possible. Since individual museums are needed to field this work, the survey also benefits participating museums on an individual level by providing benchmark data on visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographic questions … all of which can then be tracked over time in the future. Participating museums are also allowed to add 1 - 2 custom questions specific to their needs.  Which means if you value this research,  want more of it in the coming years, and want to track your own museum's progress over time, please support this work by enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers. It costs only $1,000 per museum.

 

• Survey bias: All surveys have some degree of survey bias (except, perhaps, the US Census Bureau). Blind spots. No survey is perfect. The Annual Survey of Museum-Goers represents only a small sliver of the US population: those that visit museums on a regular basis. It does not represent casual visitors or non-visitors. My broader population samples are far better for assessing the broader population, but they too have a blind spot. That is, there is a large segment of the population that is extremely difficult to survey. Surveys simply never reach them. And while I could weight my sample for, say, income or education (since low-income, low-education households tend to be under-represented even in broader-population samples), that will only tell me what those individuals who the survey reached. Having a survey reach you, and then responding to it, is an indicator of broader engagement with the world, and those that are never surveyed may not be as engaged with the world (for lots of valid reasons), and thus have different behaviors and attitudes. Thus, when looking at results from any survey, including mine, take into consideration how large that blind spot is, and be cautious about assuming the results are truly representative of the broader population.

Want to make sure you don't miss one of the upcoming data releases via The Data Museum? To subscribe by email, scroll up until you see the box on the right-hand side that says "To subscribe..." Click on "subscribe" and follow the prompts. (This gets around the mystery of why the box for entering your email address actually doesn't appear, though you can click in the empty white space of the box and find where to enter it, if you are so inclined.)