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As the majority of research is now released via infographic, The Data Museum is currently on long-term hiatus. These archives will be maintained on the Wilkening Consulting website for the foreseeable future.

For the latest research findings, please visit the Data Stories section of the Wilkening Consulting website.

Museums: Positive/Negative Effect on US?

8/15/2019

 
Recently, this new data from Pew Research Center caught my eye.
Picture

I looked at it and thought, hmmm, interesting. And wondered how museums would rank.

So I fielded it.


I did a "large test" sample of 501 individuals from the broader population, which is enough to make this generalized comparison (though if I wanted to nail it down more precisely, I'd add a thousand respondents).

For museums:
  • Negative: 4%
  • Positive: 50%
  • I don't know: 46%

Interesting. There's some good news here and some not-so-good news.
​
First, the good news. We are right up there with the highest things ranked organizations that Pew measured. And, even more importantly, our "negative" rating is A-MA-ZING. We demolished the competition because virtually no one said we were, uhm, bad.

But the not-so-good news is the "I don't know" response. Nearly half of respondents didn't know. They didn't have enough information to decide we were a net good or bad thing in our country. And I find that appalling. To be fair, the other organizations on the lists had "I don't know" responses too … but nowhere near ours. The closest one is "labor unions," with 27% saying "I don't know."

There's one more way to look at the data that makes museums look pretty good, however. It is a simplified version of the "net promoter score," in that we take the positives, subtract the negatives, and come up with a score that tells us if each thing, overall, is viewed as a net good or net bad thing for our country. So let's do that:

Churches and religious organizations: 52 - 29 = 23
Technology companies: 50 - 33 = 17
Colleges and universities: 50 - 38 = 12
Labor unions: 45 - 28: 17
Banks and other financial institutions: 39 - 39 = 0
Large corporations: 32 - 53 = -21
The national news media: 25 - 64 = -39

MUSEUMS: 50 - 4 =  46

​In this scoring, museums crush everyone else. And this probably has a lot to do with how much we are trusted.

So celebrate this finding … but then double-down on our ongoing challenge of broadening our reach to that nearly half of the population that couldn't answer the question in the first place.
Lath
8/27/2019 08:58:23 am

Curious if this was a general population sample, or a sample of museum goers? Since 75% of Americans don't go to museums, don't knows in a general population sample would not be unexpected. Thanks!

Susie Wilkening link
8/27/2019 06:28:50 pm

Hi Lath - It is a broader population sample. I find the result puzzling still because it is so much higher than everything else (most people don't know much about labor unions these days, for example), and because while a large chunk says "don't know" for this question, that isn't consistent with repeated samples that finds the vast majority of Americans find museums trustworthy. So … puzzling.

Kenneth C Turino
4/23/2020 11:41:36 am

Very useful Susie
Gathering date and this, the information on the trustworthiness of museums along with The Value of History Statement (History Relevancy) are helping us craft a statement for donors on why our work is important.


Comments are closed.

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