More Data Stories and releases from the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers to come at The Data Museum!


Love this research? Need to benchmark YOUR audience? Then join the 2020 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers!
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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 2020 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 2020 is only $1,000 per museum.

Click on infographic to enlarge, download, or print.

Attending AASLH? Join us for:
"Wanting to Know? American Perspectives on Bias, Trust, and Inclusive History" 
Thursday, August 29 at 1:45 p.m. 
With Donna Sack (Naper Settlement), Dina Bailey (International Coalition of Sites of Conscience), and Sabrina Robins (African Heritage, Inc.)

Last year, I shared that all good research yields even more questions. That continues to be true, but sometimes those questions align with larger ideas that come from others. Such as the Dalai Lama.

Meeting the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala, India last fall as a participant in the Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion Through Museums Summit helped me crystallize research patterns I have been noticing into a coherent theory: that knowledge brings a "warmth of mind," or compassion. That is, if we as humans want to do more to solve the ills of the world, making it a more just and equal place for all humans, we need to consider what it is that makes people care about those issues in the first place.

But as much as I love what the Dalai Lama said, I felt the need to back it up a bit. That is, if knowledge yields empathy and compassion, what motivates that pursuit of knowledge in the first place? My research had already suggested an answer: curiosity.

And thus the storyline of the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, as well as broader population comparison sample.

The surveys:

• The 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers is a survey of museum-goers, not casual visitors or the broader public.  Fielded this winter, as of this writing (responses still trickling in) there were 10,001 respondents from the email lists of 24 museums, with 56% coming from art, history, and cultural museums, and 44% from children's museums, zoos, and science centers.  This breakdown is excellent, as it allows me to examine and compare two very different groups of visitors (families with minor children and adult audiences) 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 1,541 respondents from across the country, with only 13% sharing that they visit museums regularly (note that this is a rather different question than if they had visited a museum in the previous year; that, in oft-repeated broader population sampling, tends to hover around 28%, give or take a few percentage points).

Research goals:

In particular, the surveys focused on the following themes:

• The work of visiting museums. In 2018 we found that parents of young children found visiting museums to be equal parts hard work and pure pleasure. This “pain/pleasure” index for museum visits yielded a great deal of discussion, and I was asked to repeat the question for all museum-goers for greater context. This time, I followed it up with an open-ended question to ask for details about their answer … to explain the “why” behind the hassle.
• Curiosity. What values and outcomes do individuals place on curiosity? What sparks their curiosity? What do they deliberately do to cultivate it in themselves, their children? And how does  curiosity-as-motivation differ from curiosity-as-aspiration? Finally, how does curiosity vary across the broader population?
• Other knowledge-creating activities. What are the other ways that people pursue informal learning? In some ways this will help us identify our competition, but it also will highlight new opportunities for partnerships. Additionally, how does participation informal learning vary across the broader population?
• Empathy. How does knowledge affect people’s ability to connect with others? Do they feel that having more knowledge has made them more understanding of viewpoints different than their own? Does this affect their work? Their community? How they raise their children? Do they care about this? Do they think museums have helped with this? And can we use empathy to promote more civic discourse in these polarized times?
• 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 that have worked with me in either 2017 and 2018 are now tracking their results over time, for even greater insight. (See below for how you can do likewise in 2020.)

Research Releases:

As in previous years, I'll be releasing research findings to the field. Most will likely be in the form of infographic Data Stories, but some will be supported by short essays on The Data Museum. The Data Stories and essays will begin this summer (2019).

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 2020 Annual Survey of Museums. 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 thought. 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, 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.)