Conventional wisdom is that young adults are not that connected to their communities. They increasingly lead virtual lives, and real life neighbors and places don't matter as much. Right?

Not so fast. As I have tweeted, there are some trends and data that indicate that young adults may desire real-life community connections as much as any other generation. But how they are going about it appears to be causing some generational tensions.

First, let's go to the data. In my fall 2016 survey of the broader population, I asked respondents about their connection to their community, community attributes they valued, and museum-going patterns.

In terms of connection to community, my data is similar to what the Pew Research Center has found in their civic engagement work. Young adults don't feel as connected to their communities as older ones. But this makes sense. Young adulthood is a time of mobility and transition for many. If you haven't lived long in your local community, you probably wouldn't feel that connected either. Those deep roots simply haven't established yet. Parenthood seems to be a key driver for many to develop roots, but young adults are continuing to put off family formation. That could, theoretically, entail a further slowdown in a feeling of connection.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that young adults (with or without children) don't care about their community. While their connection may be weaker than older individuals (who have likely lived there longer), they appear to want more from their communities. Compared with adults 55 and older, young adults under 35 are about 50% more likely to want access to parks, interesting foods/markets/restaurants, and to live in a diverse neighborhood.

Open enrollment has begun for Wilkening Consulting's first annual national survey of museum-goers. And I'd love for your museum to be a part of it, possibly for free!

To kickoff this annual survey, this year the first 15 qualified* museums will participate at no cost. Additional participating museums will be offered a 50% discount on the fee ($1,250, normally $2,500).

To enroll, simply take a few minutes and go to http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3221318/2017-Annual-Survey-Enrollment.

What is the annual field-wide study?  Participation in this research enables your museum to:

• annually survey your stakeholders and track change over time via standard, benchmark questions
• better understand your visitors, who they are, their behaviors, and their values
• include up to two custom questions just for your respondents
• receive results via slide deck and spreadsheet
• discuss your results in a one-hour call with me (Susie Wilkening)
• support broader research on behalf of the field

When will the survey take place? Surveys will launch in mid-January.

Enrolling is easy. Simply take a few minutes and go to http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3221318/2017-Annual-Survey-Enrollment. 

To have the best chance of being selected to participate at no cost, I strongly encourage you to enroll now! Any museum can participate. I will notify enrolled museums if they qualified for no-cost participation on a rolling basis.

*What does "qualified" mean?  I'll be seeking a balance of museum types, including history museums, art museums, science museums/centers, and children's museums.  Museums must be willing to launch their survey on schedule in mid-January, and must have robust enough lists to ensure at least 100 respondents. Full details, including selection criteria for no-cost participation, are in the enrollment form.  Enrolling does not absolutely commit you to participating; until you launch your survey, you may always choose to not participate. ​

A few weeks ago, I shared new research about the motivations of parents who visit museums. They may not visit often (as little as once per year), but when they do go, most parents have extrinsic motivations, and only some have deep, inherent, intrinsic motivations about their own learning and enjoyment. Since the attitudes of parents affect the attitudes and behaviors of children, those differences likely matter from generation to generation. 

But what about the broader population of parents? This graphic begins to break down the attitudes and behaviors of American parents towards museums.

​Based on my conservative estimates, over half the American population of parents do not visit museums. At all. Museums are simply not on their radar screens. This includes: 

• 17% of American parents who personally dislike museums and simply would not consider going. Period. This doesn't mean that they think museums are inherently bad. Just that they personally dislike the experience (or think they would).
• 17% of American parents who might take their children to a museum if they had a good reason. For example, if they truly believed that going to museums would help their child in school, they might consider it. But they have no evidence that museums might be helpful to their children, so they don't consider them. (This doesn't even take into account cost, by the way.) These parents need museums to give them a compelling reason to visit ... and then provide a fun experience as well to make them want to return.
• 21% of American parents might go if the subject was perfect. For example, take a family that would otherwise never consider visiting a museum. But a child in the house is obsessed with … frogs. If a local museum had a temporary frog exhibition then they might visit. The barriers are confidence they will have a good time, whether they have the time or money to visit, and if they even hear about the exhibition in the first place (a big if, considering these families are not on museum email lists and don't necessarily follow local media).

For parents that do visit museums at least once a year, I have adjusted their numbers to reflect their relative share of the US parental population (not as a percentage of parents who visit museums, which is what I shared in my last post).

Stepping back, however, what's the big thing missing from the vast majority of parents? A strong, intrinsic motivation to visit museums as an enjoyable activity. And if the parents don’t inherently view museums as enjoyable, why would their children?

This does beg the question of how museums can do a better job of connecting, meaningfully, with both children and adults. Some museums do a better job with children, some with adults, and some do both well. But it is incumbent on all museums to meaningfully serve all ages if we are going to matter now and in the future.

Finally, as I said before, the purpose of the survey wasn't to examine parents in particular.  During my analysis, I found myself digging deeper to understand what the data was saying about parents, but there is a lot more about all adults coming!

Methodology note: broader population sampling that is truly representative of the broader population is practically impossible. My sampling skews somewhat towards those with more education than the overall population, so I made sure I had a big enough sample for robust responses from those with less education to better inform my estimates. But even that is not completely sufficient, as even the best sampling methods still don't reach some parts of the population such as the extreme poor, the extreme elderly, recent immigrants, and more. I've conservatively hedged my estimates to try to accommodate this. If anything, my estimate that 55% of American parents do not visit museums is too low.


The questions for this survey have been inspired by ongoing conversations within the museum field (who goes to museums, why they visit, and what that means for communities) and ongoing research in the fields of education and psychology around lifelong learning and intrinsic motivation.

So let's explain the graphic.  Among parents who had visited museums at least once in the past year:

• Nearly half visit for other people.  Their children, primarily.  That is, they visit for extrinsic reasons, not because they themselves are that interested in learning.
• About 10% visit for personally functional reasons. The museum fits a need or very specific interest, but they are not visiting because they are that curious about new things, and neither are they visiting for their children.
• About a third do personally enjoy learning new things, but it is not their primary motivation. Instead, it is a contributing motivator, along with functional reasons and to benefit their children.
• About 10% are Super Intrinsic learners.  A love of learning is likely their primary motivation, but that doesn't mean they don't have extrinsic motivations as well; indeed, they are just as likely to say they visit for their children to learn.  I suspect their enthusiasm for learning may provide markedly different experiences for their children, however.

Note that this data, from a broader population sample, only refers to parents who actually had visited a museum in the past year.  I am pretty confident of these segments within that group, especially since some of it makes sense in the context of what good evaluators often find in their work. What's new is being able to put numbers to these segments more broadly.  

Additionally, I'm not deep enough in the analysis to estimate what percentage of parents overall they comprise or to discuss how an intrinsic motivation around learning (and visiting museums) matters to families and their engagement in their community. That's coming.

Finally, remember that the purpose of the survey isn't parents.  During my analysis, I found myself digging deeper to understand what the data was saying about parents, but there is a lot more about all adults coming!


The questions for this survey have been inspired by ongoing conversations within the museum field (who goes to museums, why they visit, and what that means for communities) and ongoing research in the fields of education and psychology around lifelong learning and intrinsic motivation.

A confession. My brain is weird.

Why? Well, this what happens when I approach a new data set.

1 - Blankness.  Lots of numbers.  Just … data. 
2 - "There's nothing new here!"  Or, the data doesn't tell me anything.  Sigh.
3 - "Hmmmmm ….. Huh?"
4 - "OMG there is this huge 3D sculpture that just snapped into my brain of the data and it has all these amazing interconnections and how will I ever make sense of this there is so much here I am overwhelmed"
5 - Frantic running of new filters and reports based on said above 3D sculpture that now resides in the virtual space of my brain
6 - Wow, there is so much here!  I'm so excited and I can't wait to share!
7 - I begin sharing.

Right now, I am around step 5 but seeing step 6 around the corner. That tendril of excitement is starting to grow.

So let me tell you the gist of the survey I ran this fall. 

Psychologists and educational scholars talk a lot about the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in learning and human development. Generally, individuals with stronger intrinsic motivation tend to outperform those with stronger extrinsic motivation. The type of motivation matters.  

I wanted to push this further and consider intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations by overlaying them on behaviors around museums and values around community. How are they intertwined? Do people who are driven by stronger intrinsic motivation have different value systems about community than those with a stronger extrinsic motivation?

Then, are there ways that we can identify who is more likely to be intrinsically motivated to learn, formally or informally, and thus inherently value museums? Who are the people who are extrinsically motivated, and need to see more specific evidence about why museums matter? What evidence will they respond to?

To find out, this fall I fielded a general population sample of 1,687 American adults (1,289 completes, 398 partials). In particular, this is large enough for me to have stable samples of Americans with lower educational attainment...people that don't visit museums nearly as much as those with college degrees. 

All questions were closed-ended, and only begin to sort out the values, philosophies, behaviors, and attitudes of the segments I am beginning to see. But it is a start, and provides a solid platform for deeper research going forward. 

I'll begin sharing more in the next few weeks, as I move from step 5 to step 7.

9%. That is, according to a post of the Pew Research Center, the percentage of working scientists with Ph.D.'s who say they were inspired to pursue science based on "childhood experience of natural world, science museums." (See chart, below.)

I think that's low. Why? One big reason. Many of the scientists in the survey didn't actually answer the question.  

Let me explain.

In the survey, scientists were asked to share one or two significant experiences that influenced their decision to become a scientists. Responses were open-ended, and responses coded into categories. No issue there.

The problem is that the top category coded for behaviors and attitudes.  These are outcomes of experiences, not experiences themselves.

Now, I LOVE the top category (and would have coded for it myself). 32% of respondents said "intellectual challenge, lifelong curiosity, love of science and nature." Those are fantastic behaviors and attitudes, and they should be measured and tracked because they do matter ... a lot. But they are not experiences.  

I suspect if we were to go back to those third of respondents to follow-up saying "that's great, now tell me about the experiences that made you that way," we'd get a whole lot more responses about childhood. We'd collect more stories of science mentors (family members, teachers, etc.) and experiences that reflect awe and wonder about our natural world.

And yes, we'd collect more fantastic stories of childhood science museum experiences as well!

I've been thinking a lot about community lately, in a very personal way.

My family is about to move cross-country.  As we prepare to depart Quincy (just outside Boston), I've been thinking long and hard about what tied me to this community over the past ten years, and questioning how deep my roots actually are. 

And as we searched for our new home, there were some things that I found myself deliberately seeking in a neighborhood, and other things that didn't matter to me.  Will those things I sought help me to actively develop roots in my new community in Seattle?  What makes me value those things in the first place?

I am the type of person who thinks about these questions rather deliberately.  How do people's preferences for a community, and their engagement in a community, relate to who they are, what they do, and their values?  Are there any patterns between their preferences and values and museum visitation?  Why or why not?

As a field, we have talked about all of these things.  Community.  Lifelong learning.  Museum visitation and audiences.  They have been the themes of our conferences.  Countless articles have been written.  We've tied them together in theory, sought connections in our work practice, and aspired to effect change in our communities or with our audiences.  My questions are not new.  Putting them together into a national sample of the broader population, however, will give us an opportunity to better understand the context in which our questions lie.  That's important.

I also believe that the findings of this initial phase of research should be shared with the field, and that the next phase should be developed with your input.  So once the survey closes, and analysis begins, I'll be sharing findings here on The Data Museum as well as my Facebook page and Twitter feed.  These findings are for you to discuss, question, and use.  Share with me what issues they raise for you.  What new ideas come out of them.  Your feedback will help make the next round of research even stronger.

Oh, and one last thing.  The survey also includes a ringer of a question.  More soon!

I believe data created on behalf of the field should be shared with the field.  Whether samples from the broader population, or samples of museum-goers, if data isn't used, it is of little value.

But data for data's sake is a futile exercise as well.  There is a lot of data "noise" out there, and sifting through all of it to find the relevant information that can inform your decision-making takes time, knowledge, and critical, contextual thinking.  To use data effectively, you have to consider the source, sample bias, how data is framed, and whether the finding matters at all in the first place. 

And if it passes those tests, then why does it matter for your museum, your situation?  What is the context of the data, the broader trends it may fit in with … or confound? 

That's where I come in.  With this blog I plan to do three things:

1. Share the latest research I am conducting, including broader population samples and samples of cultural consumers and museum-goers. 
2. Pick apart and contextualize relevant data from external sources, such as the US Census, Pew Research Center, and other reputable sources.
3. Constantly assess if the data actually matters to museums and, if so, what it means both short-term and long-term to the future of museums.

So join me as we explore the role of museums in our society, through data, research, and critical, contextual thinking.