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Researching (with) Audiences

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Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts

Part of the book series: New Directions in Cultural Policy Research ((NDCPR))

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Abstract

Audience research must strive to capture, illustrate, and interpret the value and impact of audiences’ experiences of the arts from a diverse range of disciplines, including positivist techniques that are primarily geared towards the statistical analysis of audiences’ behaviours and experiences as well as those whose objectives are more anthropological and interpretivist. This chapter provides a critical overview of the most common quantitative, qualitative, and bioscientific audience research methods and illustrates how these different methods can be fruitfully combined and even systematically triangulated to provide a multi-perspectival approach to audience research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Indeed during a scoping event for the AHRC-funded International Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts in April 2017, a recurrent issue raised by scholars and practitioners was the need to capture neutral and negative audience responses such as boredom.

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  1. School Performance Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

    Ben Walmsley

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  1. Ben Walmsley
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Correspondence to Ben Walmsley .

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Walmsley, B. (2019). Researching (with) Audiences. In: Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts. New Directions in Cultural Policy Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26653-0_5

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