Omnivorous audiences of performing arts: evidence from Taiwan

Abstract

This research analyzes Taiwan data from a national attendance survey of four performing arts categories - music, dance, contemporary drama, and traditional theatre - and uses econometric models to examine the determinants of performing arts attendance for these four genres from various aspects. We find that the audience of traditional theatre is quite different from the audiences of the other three performing arts categories, and that the pair-wise correlation coefficients for the participations among music, dance contemporary, and traditional theatre performing arts are all positive. The study further categorizes the audiences into four groups based on variety and frequency of participation: sporadic univores, sporadic omnivores, frequent univores, and frequent omnivores. A multinominal logistic regression identifies what factors influence a respondent’s decision to attend more than one type of performing arts events, allowing to identify segments of the audiences that exhibit a high degree of omnivorousness.

Keywords:

• Arts performance
• attendance
• multinominal logistic regression
• multivariate probit regression
• omnivorous