Measuring and Understanding Diversity Is Not So Simple: How Characteristics of Personal Identity Can Improve Museum Audience Studies

ABSTRACT

For decades, museums have been seeking diversity in their audiences, for reasons including equity, vitality, community relations, and audience development. The initial emphasis on diversity was about race, and although museum initiatives and programming forged ahead with evolving definitions of diversity, the visitor studies field has a mixed record of participating in that evolution. The usefulness of visitor demographics in representing diversity has been debated and, although the field has exploded simple conceptions such as “the typical visitor,” visitor research professionals have not thoroughly applied our skills to help museums understand how to define, encourage, and monitor diversity, or to document its benefits. This article suggests that more thoughtful measures of audience diversity can be created by expanding demographics with characteristics of personal identity. Pragmatic examples of such measures in visitor research are presented.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank our colleagues and clients who have contributed to our thinking about the measurement and understanding of diversity, especially Dr. Deborah Mack at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and Dr. Suzi Seriff, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin.

Notes

¹For example, a finding that X% of a museum's visitor groups are families with children doesn't necessarily help that museum to understand who they are. Families vary by ages of children, by children's prior museum experience, by children's participation or not in the decision to visit that museum, and so on.

²One of the field's early contributions was to counter the notion of a “typical visitor” (e.g., Hayward, 1998), so it made sense to explore types of audience segments.

³Visitors to various community festivals (Irish, Dutch, Bosnian, Pacific Islander, Mauritian) had different motivations for visiting, depending on their social identification. The author found that self-identification was correlated with motivations (from a preset list) to visit the festival. Visitors who had family or friends in the group (the majority of noncommunity members) were combined with people with no connection.

⁴This is the type of format used in visitor surveys by the U.S. National Park Service and other federal government agencies.

⁵Data tables and graphs presented in the remainder of this article are from studies conducted by the authors; because individual authors are not always named in the research reports, references are cited using the name of the firm: People, Places & Design Research (PPDR).

⁶However, our research found that people with a secondary identification as Native American are more interested in Native American topics than people with no Native American heritage.

⁷While interviewing people for a Civil War project, for example, we could not necessarily classify visitors from the South as having a “Southern perspective”—many were born elsewhere and moved to the South.

⁸In establishing the African Burial Ground National Monument in lower Manhattan, the National Park Service had to regain the trust lost by other federal agencies which had sought to cover up the discovery of human remains. (See “African Burial Ground National Monument” on Wikipedia for the background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Burial_Ground_National_Monument.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian L. Werner

Brian L. Werner was Senior Research Analyst at People, Places & Design Research; since this article was written he lost his 2 1/2-year battle with cancer and passed away. He came to work in the field of visitor studies from a career in political science and was especially committed to projects involving cultural themes and identities as well as American history.

Jeff Hayward

Jeff Hayward is the Director of People, Places & Design Research and has conducted audience studies for museums and related cultural organizations since the 1980s. His background in architecture influenced him to conceive of research as a problem-solving activity for exhibition planning and audience development. Always “up for a good challenge,” he has special interests in projects involving environmental issues and social justice. Address correspondence to: Jeff Hayward, People Places & Design Research, 65 North Street, Northampton, MA 01060. E-mail: [email protected].

Christine Larouche

Christine Larouche is Senior Project Manager at People, Places & Design Research. She is a former director of education and interactive media at a French public educational television network in Canada, and is the director of an NGO that supports the development of educational facilities and computers for children in the Congo Republic. Her interests in audience research and evaluation emphasize understanding the multiple perspectives, expectations, and interests that visitors bring to their museum experiences. E-mail: [email protected].