Hidden Depths and Everyday Secrets: How Audience Sense- Making Can Inform Arts Policy and Practice

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the arts policy and research call for better understandings of arts audiences—actual and potential. The authors report on the application of Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) to audience research. SMM is an approach developed specifically for providing data useful to informing policies and practices of institutions mandated to serve publics. We review the narrative themes that have emerged from our analyses of accounts of cultural experiences by several hundred informants, and we offer five sample applications that illustrate potentials and their implications for arts policy and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts
• audiences
• culture
• qualitative research
• Sense-Making Methodology