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Approach any museum-going parent or caregiver on the floor of your museum and ask them why they are there. I bet you they say things like the museum is educational, fun for kids, and/or it is a good place for the family to visit. All fantastic reasons for visiting. But those reasons, wonderful as they are, don't really help us understand what the impact of museums are for children or their caregivers. Why? Well, impact is harder to articulate. It is harder to see. Parents and caregivers can see their kids learning and having fun, but to extrapolate out to what impact those new learnings have, well, that's harder. Yet it matters. Deeply. Hardly anyone questions that museums are educational (97% of Americans agree they are, as we found when I did public polling for AAM). But lots of experiences are educational. Thus, if we need to make a case for why museums matter (and we do), we need to not only say we are educational, but why what we do is better than other experiences, delivering better impact. In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers it was important to get a better handle on impact by building on the 2017 Survey's open-ended question on impact (The overall results will be explored more thoroughly in research releases to come.) When it comes to impact, 70% of parents said that museums helped make them more curious about the world, their top choice. This was followed by "more knowledgeable" and "more well-rounded/broadened horizons." But the curiosity thing was, well, curious. And that's because it isn't an explicit motivation. That is, only 21% of parents of children 10 and younger chose "curiosity" as a motivation for visiting museums … yet it was the most important impact of museums, with 71% choosing it.  Additionally, 94% of these parents say it is more important for museums to cultivate curiosity than help children perform better academically.
So what's going on? Clearly, curiosity isn't the quick-to-articular motivation for visiting museums. Those other reasons (learning, fun, family time) are more immediate, pressing, and motivating. Curiosity, while a highly valued impact, isn't any of those things but instead takes a lifetime to cultivate and benefit from. The immediacy of those other things, and the longer-term horizon of curiosity, creates an impact/articulation gap that turns out to be really important, especially when we back up and examine this more broadly. To start, while only 6% of museum-going parents said it was more important for museums to focus on academic achievement than curiosity, 26% of the broader population of parents said likewise. Looking at that 26% of the broader population of parents, and also the 6% of museum-going parents, was illuminating. In both samples, these respondents were significantly less likely to have a college degree. Additionally, among the museum-goers, they were nearly three times more likely to be parents of color (even when controlling for education). Both groups were also significantly less likely to cite curiosity as an impact of museums overall. The marked difference in education in both groups (and likely, by extension, socio-economic status) is troubling, as is the difference between whites and people of color. I don't know why the difference, and I say that because I haven't asked. That is something that absolutely needs to be done. I do, however, have a hypothesis. It is easy for well-educated museum-going parents (who are also overwhelmingly white) to say that curiosity is a necessity. That having a curious outlook yields better outcomes in life (which research does tend to support). But curiosity is expensive. It is expensive to nurture because it is an ever-hungry beast that needs resources to feed it. It needs museum visits, books, camps, and supplies. It also needs adult time and energy to feed. All of those cost parents and guardians in some way, and that makes nurturing curiosity a privilege that some parents have capacity to provide, but many cannot. (I've written some about capacity before; it bears reviewing.) For those who are working hard to take care of their families, but have limited capacities to do more due to external constraints in their lives, it would be easy to see a direct line between academic achievement and better outcomes … even if that direct line doesn't directly take into account what motivates someone to achieve in the first place. And for respondents of color, I hypothesize that the negative economic outcomes resulting from systemic racism may have a similar result, even when educational attainment does reach the highest levels. I also realize, however, that my hypotheses may be misguided or wrong. If so, and you have your own hypotheses, I encourage you to share them with me so that future phases of research can incorporate those ideas as well. But given the essential birthright all of us have to curiosity, if my hypothesis is correct, it is incumbent on museums to do more to provide more opportunities to more children to cultivate curiosity … and thus benefit from it over a lifetime. That is, after all, one of the most important impacts of our work. And how? It actually goes back to making it easy. Logistically, of course. We're not easy to visit (as we already know), and that has to get better. Reduced/free admission, such as through Museums for All, is a great start, but it also has to be about access, transportation, being welcoming to all, or going to where parents and caregivers already are. We should not underestimate the time and energy costs of visiting as well. We also need to be an easy solution for all parents in their need to help their children succeed. Some museums are working on this through effective partnerships (looking at you, Discovery Museum in Acton, MA, who was recently featured in the New York Times). We need more … much more … of this. But to increase the curiosity capacity in all children, low-income, middle-class, non-visiting families, and yes, our regular museum-goers we already have, we also need an overall image reboot that represents a new value proposition to parents that we are their easy solution to some of the pressures and obligations they have, as parents, in their lives. And then we need to make it so. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.
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 "I look to museums to help me teach my child. I need all the help I can get!" - This and all quotes from parents responding to 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Parents and caregivers are stressed. They are trying to pack a lot of things into a busy schedule (and affordably). Sometimes, even if they want to visit a museum, it just seems so hard. So hard to pack up the gear, deal with timing and a toilet-training toddler, corral children into the car, motivate a tween to come along, and then get out the door to stand in line and, hopefully, have a great day. So we need to make it easy. And when I say that, I don't just mean easy to visit logistically (though we need to do that too), I mean making parents lives easier. Be a deliberate, explicit solution in their lives.
Being easy means fulfilling needs. Parents today are barraged in their life with advice about how to make their kids smarter, better thinkers, more compassionate, better athletes, and so on and so forth. Ad nauseum. It is relentless. And it isn't always clear how to best accomplish any of it. Which brings us to museums as solution.
In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, I asked museum-going parents to consider what a community or world without museums would be like, and how it would affect their parenting. Most were horrified at the thought, and shared how a lack of museums would make their job as a parent so much harder. For example: Parents don't always feel they have the ability to nurture creativity in their children:
Parents realize they don't have the expertise to explore every subject with their children:
Parents don't have the time and resources to create interactive experiences for their children:
And parents would struggle to make the complexity of the world tangible (at least, not without the help of museums):
I could go on (after all, I have thousands of these quotes). But for all of these parental challenges museums are a primary answer. And without museums around to provide these things, parents would feel even more pressure, stress, and anxiety.
Now, most museum-going parents don't articulate this role of museums in their lives, that museums make their job easier. Indeed, as I recently shared, most parents find museums only slightly more pleasure than pain to visit. Why? Because parents are in the weeds of everyday parenting, and are seeing the everyday challenges of getting kids out the door to a museum. Consciously thinking about, and articulating, the overall impact of museums is not something most parents take time to do. Yet when presented with a world without museums, that impact became instantly clear to them. So, museums are already a solution … a unique, easy-to-access, solution for parents. Museum-going parents can articulate that. But we need to do a much better job of articulating it for parents, and presenting museums as a feel-good, affordable, easy solution to encourage broader museum attendance from all families, whether museum-going, casual visiting, or non-visiting. Because when we articulate and deliver on these needs our impact is clearer, our case for support is stronger, and our ability to transform lives expanded. By the way … if you would like a daily dose of a randomly selected #imaginenomuseums quote from museum-goers, follow my Twitter feed @susiewilkening or my Facebook page @wilkeningconsulting. Make the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers possible! Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  The leisure time crunch. It's what parents experience on most weekends … a list of things that need to get done, children to keep an eye on, children to shuttle around, and then falling into bed, exhausted. As shared earlier, 45% of museum-going parents report they get zero relaxation during leisure time. So if you have a busy family, and exhausted parents, where do museums fit in? Are museums an obligation, something one does for children (just like all good parents do), or is visiting fun and relaxing? And how does all of this affect what parents think about the impact of museums? Let's take a look at what parents said in the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, and try to sort this out. Exhausted Parents First, the bad news. Exhausted parents are more critical museum visitors. Compared to parents who felt more relaxed at the end of the weekend, exhausted parents were:
I'm not surprised. I have those weekends too, and they make me crabby as well. Sometimes the idea of an "enrichment" activity for my kids makes me want to go hide under the covers. So it is no wonder that, for many museum-going parents, museums are seen as yet something else to fit in, and thus somewhat painful to visit. The Pain/Pleasure Index So how painful is it really to visit museums? To find out, I asked parents if visiting museums was more work or more pleasure. Respondents were given a slider, and asked to choose where visiting museums fell, which turned into a numeric score for me (which was then easy for me to average across segments; thus, if 100% of respondents said "total pleasure", the score would be 100, while a score of 0 would mean 100% of respondents said "hard work").  Overall, parents scored museums a 55 … only slightly more pleasurable than painful. Not a great result. Two factors were most likely to affect the score:
But then it gets more interesting. The more parents visit, the more likely they are to consider museums "hard work." Additionally, those recurring visitors (especially with younger children) are more critical of museums and have generally more negative responses overall. (Note the opposite is true among those who are not parents of minor children: then, more visits then equals happier visitors.) The pattern, then, is of stressed, high-visitation rate parents who feel obliged to visit museums in order to provide their children with enrichment and learning, but just are too exhausted to enjoy it themselves. Since these stressed-out parents are nearly half of museum-going parents, and it isn't like the other half are relaxed and engaged 100% of the time either, it begs the question: what can museums do to make visiting museums a stress reducer in parents' lives? How can we be a solution in their lives, not just one more thing to cram in? And if we can figure this out, would it make visiting museums more appealing for casual and non-visitors as well? Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  When I think of museum-going parents, there are two main types I think of:
Based on who responds to the surveys of different types of museums, it has been possible to make assumptions about visitation patterns by museum type. That is, since parents overwhelmingly make up the majority of science center respondents, but only a fraction of art or history museum respondents, that tells us that families are much more likely to visit science centers than art museums. We all knew this from our own, personal, observations as well. In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, however, I actually asked parents about their visitation patterns by museum type. Since having children, which types of museums are they visiting more, about the same, or less? And while it largely confirmed our assumptions and observations, being able to back it up with data and some of the nuance that came through this question are still helpful. Caveats: first, memory is a funny thing, and respondents were asked to think back and make their own assessment of visitation patterns before/after kids … their memories could be wrong; and second, respondents were asked if they were visiting more/less, not if they had visited 10 times or once … which means a "more" response could still mean only one visit a year if they didn't visit that type of museum before children. Thus, this is an analysis of visitation patterns, not visitation rates. Art Museums Imagine a young couple who enjoys visiting art museums. They have a baby. What happens next? If they follow the pattern the data shows, a third of these types of visitors will cut back on their art museum visits. That's right, art museums effectively lose a third of their young adult audience when parenting begins. Do they come back? Yes, mostly. Sort of. Among museum-going parents, many seem to have returned as regular visitors when their children reach elementary school, and by middle and high school, audiences seem to have even grown a bit. Similarly, among the broader population of mostly non-museum-goers, young adults without children were close to twice as likely than parents to say they would be interested in visiting an art museum. So, bottom line, parents of young children don't see art museums as family friendly, and while that changes as kids age, they never reach the intensity of participation that science centers capture. But there is one more twist. On a city-by-city level, the results can vary widely. In a few cities, art museum attendance actually grew among families - even among families with very young children - indicating that each of those cities has an art museum doing a fantastic job with family engagement. In most cities, however, art museum engagement declined. Thus, the losses are clearly avoidable if the art museum does thoughtful and engaging work with families. (This last finding also highlights the value of a group of museums in a community all participating in the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, creating a cost-effective, city-wide sample where deeper insights that benefit all museums in a community are possible.) Botanical Gardens and Arboreta Overall, botanical gardens and arboreta do much better when family formation begins: 40% of museum-going parents report visiting more often, while only 11% report cutting back. Additionally, once individuals have children, visitation patterns hold steady regardless of the age of those children. History Museums and Historic Sites The pattern for history museums is a bit mixed. Overall, parents are about 3 times more likely to report increased visits than fewer visits (41% vs. 13%). But that overall positive result masks challenges with families of very young children, who were only slightly more likely to report increased rather than decreased visits to history museums. In contrast, however, parents of elementary schoolers were nearly 5 times more likely to report increased rather than decreased history museum visitation … and parents of high schoolers were 10 times more likely to report the same. In these cases, I'm thinking there is a lot of "we need to 'do' American history stuff on vacation" going on, with deliberate choices to visit things like the monuments of DC, Independence Hall, and Boston's Freedom Trail. Natural History Museums Similar to history museums, natural history museums netted increased visits; parents are about 5 times more likely to report increased visits rather than fewer visits (46% vs. 9%). But again, that overall result masks nuance: families with very young children were only 2.5 times more likely to increase than decrease visits, while parents of elementary-schoolers were 8 times more likely. By middle school, however, there is a slight pull back from natural history museums. Science Centers No surprise, science centers are the epicenter of museum engagement for families. A whopping 77% of parents reported increase visitation versus only 4% visiting less (a factor of 21 times, by the way). Similar to natural history museums, elementary-age families were the most likely to report increased visitation, but families of both younger and older children were on their heels. Caveat Reminder This work only shows the pattern of attendance, the more/same/less/I don't visit patterns. That tells us a lot about what museums are perceived to be appealing for what ages of children, and if it affects museum-goer choices (it does … a lot!). But it doesn't tell us how often. Thus, looking at this data it would be easy to assume that families with tweens and teens visit science centers just as much as parents of elementary schoolers, but we all know that isn't true. Instead, it tells us that parents of tweens and teens are visiting science centers (and other museum types) more often than they did 15 or so years ago, before children. That's a different thing, which brings us too … Young Adult Insights This data set actually tells us a great deal about young adult museum attendance too. While the news here isn't great for art museums and family engagement, it is pretty good news in terms of engagement of younger adults without children. That is, they do relatively well with that audience before children, so they have farther to fall. In contrast, science centers clearly do extremely well with families, but the data set also implies that few young adults were visiting before children. They essentially had nowhere to go but up. Results were more mixed for the other museum types. So, the pattern of attendance tells us a great deal about what is considered age-appropriate and how attendance changes. How often families visit, however, has a lot to do with leisure time, parental relaxation rates, and what I am calling the pain/pleasure index. We'll look at those next. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  I find parental patterns and attitudes around museums endlessly fascinating.
It's not that I don't adults without children aren't interesting (they are!). But museum-going adults without children tend to exhibit what I think of as "steady-state" museum-engagement. Solid, regular engagement over a lifetime. I love this audience, and how much they are curious and love museums. But parents … that's where the action is. What do I mean? Well, they are a moving target of engagement. While some were regular museum-goers before children, most museum-going parents flood into museums only after they have a child. That's great … they value museums for their children! Except that we lose an estimated two-thirds of them as regular museum-goers by the time middle school rolls around. Including the parents. Not so great there. (You can get a quick overview of parents by downloading "Museum-Going Parents: A Data Story.") It strikes me, then, that if we want to be organizations that thrive in the future, we need to figure this audience out. We need to figure out how to keep the kids engaged, so they grow into that lovely "steady-state" group of young adults. But we also should fight to retain the parents, for whom museums can and should provide valuable services through middle and older age. Fortunately, the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers allows us to look ever more carefully at parents and guardians, in particular focusing on:
I'll be unpacking all of this research through the next several releases. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum. As we continue to explore leisure time, commitments, and relaxation (and what it means for museum time), we've learned that, well, it's complicated. The broader population is both more and less stressed when it comes to relaxation and getting things done during leisure time. Doing more during leisure time doesn't necessarily contribute to less relaxation (it depends). And leisure time commitments shift and change over life stage. If we back up, however, what are some big conclusions that we can draw?  The Rule of Thirds
Let's take a look back at the graphic I shared earlier, focusing on the broader population side. Notice something? It breaks down roughly in thirds. That is, about a third of Americans are getting no relaxation during their leisure time, about another third are getting some, and a final third are relaxed and ready for a new week. (Sure, these numbers are not exact, but they are close enough when it comes to making it easy for you to remember. Interesting aside: the Rule of Thirds is something I see a lot of in my work when examining the broader population. I could/should write a book on this.) More activities does not mean less relaxation. The "Do Mores" who do more seem to cluster at "satisfied/somewhat relaxed." That is, those who do more are, surprisingly, more likely to get some relaxation than those that do less. Adding museum visits to the schedule doesn't necessarily mean less time to relax. Additionally, the Do Mores are the most likely to visit museums; about a third of those who do four to five things in their leisure time, and over half of those who do seven or more things. This indicates that there are opportunities for museums to reach more "Do Mores" … especially if they begin to think of museums as relaxing places and/or places where they can accomplish multiple things at once. Fewer activities does correlate with more stress. Those who say they get no relaxation at all during their leisure time actually, on average, do fewer things during that time. Indeed, those who only do one or two activities during their leisure time are the least likely to feel they have any time to relax. If your first reaction to that is "what the heck are they doing then?" you are not alone. That was my instinctive reaction as well, but it isn't a particularly understanding/thoughtful reaction because, as we all know, life is more complicated than that. Time constraints are only one stressor in our lives. We have to keep in mind that there are many other stressors that affect this response, including financial, family medical and health issues, job pressures, etc. Additionally, for non-visitors, a visit to museum may be too our-of-the-ordinary to not feel stressful as well. What do I mean? Some studies have shown that people perceive places they know to be physically closer (and thus easier to get to) than places they don't know. It is human nature to travel further to go the grocery store we know than the closer one we don't know. We'll even say the known grocery store is closer, when actually it is further! If we do that, then think how far away a museum feels to a person who hasn't been to a museum since a fourth-grade field trip. Even if they pass by one every day. Combine that with those potential stressors we don't know about (but matter deeply), and it becomes much easier to see why museums don't fit into more people's lives. A Word About Parents Which brings us to parenting, relaxation (or lack thereof) and museums. Parents don't find museums relaxing. Let me repeat that. Parents don't find museums relaxing. The research already shows that parents over-index among those who feel they have zero time to relax. Now consider taking a three-year-old who is in the middle of toilet training to a museum. (Especially if the museum only has automatic toilets; ARGH! Just thinking about that in my not-so-distant past stresses me out, and you know I'm as passionate as they get about museums.) So when we ask parents to consider visiting museums with their children, or to visit more often, we are asking parents for a lot. Because the research also shows (as I'll share later this summer) that museum-going parents find visiting museums to be about equal parts pain and pleasure. If that's what museum-going parents say, I shudder to consider how casual and non-visitors might respond. Additionally, parents rarely tell me that they find museums relaxing. By and large, it simply doesn't come up. Clearly, then, there are opportunities to reach more people effectively, and challenges to reach everyone. We knew that already, but this work begins to frame what those challenges are through the leisure time/relaxation lens. Other constraints will be studied in more detail in the 2019 Annual Survey. Next up: a deeper dive on parents. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  We all know that we are busy. Busy in our work lives. Busy in our leisure time. And, as I recently shared, museum-goers are extra-busy, especially during their weekends and leisure time.
But is busyness a steady-state, or does it shift and change over a lifetime? The answer appears to be yes to both. That is, there are certain attributes that many of the busiest tend to have in common (such as museum-going, but also educational attainment). But there are also significant shifts as life stages evolve. These shifts also, unsurprisingly, affect stress levels. Let's take at what the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers and broader population sampling told us about leisure time, relaxation, and the three main life stages. Young adults without children Museum-going young adults are busy. The busiest segment of all museum-goers, averaging 4.9 activities during their typical weekends or leisure time. In particular, they are significantly more likely to catch up on sleep (over 2x as likely!), spend time with friends, and pursue personal hobbies. This all sounds fun and relaxing, right? Not so fast. They were also the most likely segment to catch up on work, and they were statistically even with parents in doing chores and errands. In the end, this busyness doesn't really translate to relaxation, as a third of museum-going young adults report having no chance to relax at all during their leisure time, and only 16% report being "relaxed and ready for a new week." For the broader population of young adults, the trends were similar. They were also packing more things into their leisure time (3.6 things on average versus 2.8 for the topline/aggregate average). Additionally, they were more likely to report the extremes on relaxation; on the one hand, more young adults from the broader population are getting no relaxation at all (a whopping 43%), but on the other hand, young adults from the broader population are twice as likely as museum-going young adults to feel "relaxed and ready for a new week." Parents of minor children "Sometimes I'm overwhelmed with all I need to do at home and hoping I'm good enough for my kids." - respondent to the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers That quote alone speaks volumes about the so-called leisure time of parents. Parents, regardless of the age of their children, are busy, and doing the best they can. Museum-going parents averaged 4.7 activities, and parents in the broader population averaged 3.8, higher than the topline average for both. For parents, leisure time is overwhelmingly work. They are more likely to be doing chores and errands, of course, but also shuttling children to activities (especially if they had children age 5 and up) and spending time with family (read that as childcare, as it spiked with parents of the youngest children). Additionally, parents are significantly less likely to be spending time on their own personal hobbies (read that as no "me time"). So it should be no surprise that parents are the most likely to report they get no relaxation at all during their leisure time: an appalling 46%. That number is consistent among both museum-going parents as well as parents from the broader population. And it is also consistent regardless of the age of children. And since only 11% of museum-going parents reported being "relaxed and ready for a new week," that means that the families we are, or hope to be, attracting are not only busy, but headed by stressed adults who are wondering how they are going to get everything done. It means a visit to a museum is yet something else to do (likely for their kids), and scheduling it in is likely tough, requiring tradeoffs. It also means that if museums are going to engage more families, we have to do a better job presenting a value proposition that shows how visiting museums is an easy way to accomplish many goals … thus making it easier to make it a higher priority, and less of an obligation. Or, in other words, that a museum visit can be that learning and fun activity for children, promote great family time, and maybe, just maybe, help parents pursue their own interests and hobbies as well. Older adults Finally, let's look at older adults. For museum-goers, they averaged only 4.1 activities during their leisure time, and for the broader population, only 3.2. That lower level of activity translated into lower levels of stress as well, with only 17% of older museum-going adults saying they received no relaxation at all (for reference, parents were nearly 3x more likely to say no relaxation). The broader population of older adults, however, showed considerably more stress than their museum-going peers, however, with a third saying they had no chance to relax at all. That difference in stress levels between older museum-goers and the broader population, however, is a potent reminder that, regardless of life stage, stress comes in many forms. While time constraints are one potential form of stress, this research doesn't approach measuring other types (such as financial, medical or health, or any other stressors). I'll come back to this topic next time. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  Think back to the last weekend (or time off) that you consider "typical." I bet you were pretty busy, weren't you? Chores and errands, time with family or friends, maybe you had a nice meal. Did you catch up on sleep? Check your work email? Maybe even binge watch something on Netflix?
Did you go to a museum? Be honest here … work doesn't count. And at the end of that weekend or time off, how did you feel? Did you get everything done? Did you feel relaxed? Even a little? The thing is, I bet you were busy, packing in a lot of things during two short days. Maybe a museum made the cut, but statistically speaking, probably not. Sometimes it is hard to fit in that museum visit. Life simply gets in the way. Yet we want museums to be an attractive and realistic option for people in our communities. That means we have to have a strong understanding of how different segments of the population typically spend their leisure time now, so we can understand how museums do, and do not, fit in. It also means understanding the opportunities and responsibilities that people have, which may make visiting a museum more appealing, feel like yet more work to get done, or a virtual impossibility. To begin to suss all of this out I included a short series of leisure-time questions in the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers as well as a broader population comparison sample (mostly non-visitors to museums, as well as casual visitors and a small number of avid museum-goers). Respondents were asked to think back to the last weekend (or time off) they considered "typical," and indicate the things they did. (They could also write in additional activities.) They were then asked to consider how they felt at the end of the weekend. Quantity of Activities I like to say that "the do mores do more." It's a spin on "if you want something done, ask a busy person." Avid museum-goers as well as casual visitors are clearly the do mores, averaging 4.3 activities in their typical weekend. And the more museums people go to, the more they do on a typical weekend; those who visited only one or two museums in the last year averaged 4.1 activities while those who visited five or more averaged 4.7 activities. Museum-goers are busy! The sample of non-visitors, however, was rather different; they averaged only 2.4 activities, even when museum attendance is controlled for. (Similarly, the number of activities goes up with educational attainment.) This tells us that museum-goers are leading more jam-packed lives when it comes to the quantity of things they have to get done PLUS the things they want to get done during non-working time. But I do want to be careful here that this doesn't imply that people who don't visit museums, or those with lower educational attainment, have more time available that museums could fill. It is more complicated than that, in ways that go beyond what my surveys measure. At this point, we are simply assessing leisure time activities, not work obligations, health constraints, or any number of other things that affect leisure time and the choices an individual makes for that time. But Did They Relax? No. In perhaps one of the most discouraging findings I've ever seen, the number of Americans, museum-goers or not, that report at the end of the weekend they are "relaxed and ready for a new week" is depressingly low. I happen to think that this is a health issue. The fact that so few of us get full relaxation is a problem, and that over a third of the population does not feel a bit relaxed is even more of a problem. This implies our stressful lives are an ever-constant for too many. Or, as one person wrote in, "[this is a] silly question. We are all stressed." Even worse, I am only capturing this through the lens of time constraints. That is, I'm not capturing economic pressures, family health crises or chronic conditions, job stress, or other internal or external constraints or anxieties that prevent us from having time to take care of ourselves. Additionally, my findings are reflected by recent polling done by the American Psychiatric Association, which shows that anxiety is increasing among Americans, noting that the repercussions are a physiological health threat as well as a mental health one. All of these findings beg some key questions, namely:
I'll address some of these questions in my next few posts. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum. Museums across the country are working to address more inclusive practices both within their operations as well as in their interpretive practice. But none of this is easy work.
Thanks to an IMLS National Leadership Grant, the Naperville Heritage Society (Naperville, IL) is spearheading multiple phases of benchmarking and audience research on the inclusive history museum. I'm delighted to be leading these research phases. But this is where YOU come in. If you are a history organization, or an art or science museum with historical collections and/or interpretation, please help us 1 - benchmark current practice; and 2 - sign up for free audience research so that your organization can benefit directly from this work. 1 - Inclusive History Organizational Practice Benchmarking Survey. Please help us benchmark the 2018 state of inclusive practice. Before you take the survey, please note:
Click here to begin the Inclusive History Organizational Practice Benchmarking Survey 2 - Free Research Opportunity: Audiences and Inclusive History. This survey of your visitors will give you insight into how they may respond to the inclusion of different viewpoints, new interpretations of history, and the presentation of a more inclusive history of your community or site. The survey will likely include:
Organizations that are selected to participate in this research opportunity agree to send out a email blast to their contact list (as well as any other methods they choose) in September 2018. Each participating organization will receive their confidential results in late fall/early winter, and have an opportunity to discuss those results directly with me. To volunteer to participate in this research, please complete the Inclusive History Organizational Practice Benchmarking Survey, and indicate your interest at the end of the survey. The overall results from all phases of research will be shared with the field beginning in 2019. I'll keep you updated as well. Additionally, AASLH will be the repository for this benchmark data, benefiting the field in the future. If you have any questions about this work, please contact me at susie (at) wilkeningconsulting (dot) com. |
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