Embedded Files
Audience interviews
Audience interviews
Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 135 audience members in Bristol, Liverpool and London. Building on findings from the highly exploratory life history interviews in the pilot study, we designed a new interview schedule which asked participants to discuss the following topics:
Arts engagement (c.25 minutes)
Which art forms they chose to engage with / not engage with, how they made decisions about what to attend, the value of arts attendance in their lives, their thoughts on the contemporary artsThe arts where you live (c. 10 minutes)
Participants were asked to reflect on their city as a place for the arts, what arts provision was plentiful and where it was lacking, their awareness of arts events, and how their location shaped their engagement.Routes to engagement (c.10 minutes)
Finally, in keeping with the pilot study, participants were asked to describe how they became interested in the arts, from school and family influences, to the ways in which their engagement fits with their other interests today.
The schedule was still flexible, providing a series of questions and prompts to ellicit descriptions of arts engagement from the participants, but questions were often asked in a different order, or abandoned altogether when participants talked about those topics spontaneously.
On average, interviews lasted 48 minutes.
UACA Interview Schedule (PDF, 110KB)
Action research
Action research
Further information on the action research phase of the project will be added shortly.
National survey
National survey
On 24th October 2018, we launched a survey aimed to test initial findings from our audience interviews amongst the wider arts-attending population in the UK. In particular, we were interested in the idea that even arts attenders who see themselves as open-minded have limits in their attendance; everyone seeks some element of guarantee within their willingness to take a risk. The survey was designed to investigate the factors driving people towards or away from contemporary arts and unfamiliar programming.
"The first year of this project has shown that the boundaries between attenders and non-attenders are not fixed, and there are many factors that draw people towards contemporary arts or keep them away. In this survey, we’re hoping to find out more about what makes people take a risk in their arts attendance, and how that knowledge might be valuable to organisations who want to make their work more accessible to more people."
Director of the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre, Stephanie Pitts
The survey (1.2MB) was hosted on Survey Monkey and employed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative questions.
Recruitment and sampling
Recruitment and sampling
We enlisted the help of UK-based arts organisations to publicise the survey amongst their audiences on the day of the launch. This was well-received amongst industry partners, many of whom happily offered to post on social media channels and 68 twitter accounts (mostly belonging to arts organisations) tweeted about the research with some also posting on Facebook and circulating it in enewsletters. From our own SPARC account, we know that our tweets about the research garnered over 28,000 impressions and a further 1100 on Facebook.
Despite this coordinated publicity effort, engagement with the survey was low. We received 38 responses on the first day, which slowly climbed to 142 responses by the time we closed the survey on 31st January 2019. While still providing a substantial data set for a lengthy quali-quant survey, the relatively low completion rate perhaps indicated a mismatch between the 280-character conversations of Twitter, and the greater time commitment of our survey.
Recruiting via social media helped to reach a younger sample than is often seen in this research, with 36% of respondents under 35 and 18% over 65. Women comprised almost two-thirds of the respondents. 85% of the sample described themselves as white British (126 responses to demographic questions).
There is a propensity for surveys such as this to be completed by arts professionals. We therefore asked every respondent about any professional engagement or training in the arts, and to tell us their occupation. Collating responses regarding professional arts practice, working in the arts as a manager or similar, and open-text responses in the ‘Other’ field, we have identified 62 respondents (49%) with a current or prior professional interest in the arts. This proportion is significantly higher for younger respondents (77% of 25-34 year olds) and people of colour.
Response rate
Response rate
The survey was designed to take around 20-25 minutes to complete; the average time taken to complete the survey was 27 minutes (excluding 4 outliers of multiple hours).
142 respondents:
71 respondents fully answered every question on the survey (‘COMPLETE’=C)
47 respondents completed the survey, but missed out the odd question (‘ALMOST COMPLETE’=A)
8 respondents completed the survey, but missed out whole sections (‘PARTIALLY COMPLETE’=P)
16 respondents abandoned the survey part of the way through (‘INCOMPLETE’=I)
Having studied the data, we decided that there was valuable insight in all responses, even those that were incomplete, therefore we have not removed any of the 142 responses in their entirety from our data analysis. We have, however, excluded a respondents’ answers from analysis of a particular group of questions when their responses were too incomplete. The completion rate for each group of questions is therefore as follows:
Survey responses by group
Survey responses by group
Place and Space
Questions about the arts local to them and a venue they visit often
138 responsesMotivation to attend
"What are the most important aspects of a live arts experience for you?"
139 responsesArtform Attendance
"In the last 12 months, how many times have you been to the following [art forms]?"
135 responsesMost likely to attend
Questions regarding why certain art forms appeal more than others.
132 responsesLeast likely to attend
Opinions on disliked or least attended art forms.
127 responsesAttitudes to contemporary
Gauging receptiveness to the contemporary, and what that word is thought to mean.
129 responsesRisk-taking
Respondents were asked to reflect on a time when they took a risk in attending an arts event.
117 responsesDemographics and profession
Demographic characteristics, occupation, and professional engagement in the arts
126 responsesMarketing images and copy
Reactions to 1 of 5 pieces of arts marketing
123 responses
(A/B Test breakdown: 28, 26, 21, 27, 21)Send a message to the arts sector
"If you could send a message to arts organisations in the UK today, what would you ask them to think about?"(optional)
115 responses
Data analysis
Data analysis
Interviews
Interviews
All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, either by Elizabeth Dobson, UACA Support Officer or by a transcription company (depending on participants’ data processing permission). Interview transcripts were then returned to participants, who were given two weeks to suggest any amendments. Once transcripts were approved, they were fully anonymised, inputted into NVivo for analysis, and printed copies were produced for members of the research team.
We are currently analysing the transcripts and writing papers and reports on the findings. We are analysing the data using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), in which the researcher seeks to understand how a participant makes sense of and finds meaning in their lived experiences. Using IPA, we have been closely reading the transcript of each participant, looking at how they articulate the value of arts engagement in their lives and what impact this had on their selection of arts events.
We also take note of how participants present themselves in the interview, paying particular attention to moments of reflection, realisation, contradiction and self-censorship. We combine this with thematic analysis across the dataset as a whole, looking for participants’ comments on a particular topic. Data relating to the topic is then coded in NVivo, and analysed to find sub-themes where participants speak about the topic in a similar way.
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