The NEA has just released three new reports it commissioned to look more closely at the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts from different perspectives. I’ll blog about all three of them this week and next, starting today with a quick look at the terrific paper by our friends Jennifer Novak-Leonard and Alan Brown about why we need to look “beyond attendance.”

Those two were the obvious choice to tackle this topic for the NEA. In 2004 Brown published a much-needed (and since then, much-cited) framework of five modes of art engagement [pdf], in which observational participation — sitting in the seat, wandering through the exhibition — is seen as only one slice of the pie, and not necessarily the tastiest slice. Novak-Leonard, the lead author of the new paper, worked on the influential RAND study “Gifts of the Muse” (also 2004) and soon thereafter joined Brown at WolfBrown.

Their paper, “Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation,” [pdf] will speed the shift in the national arts conversation away from butts-in-the-seats thinking and toward a more holistic, contemporary definition of arts engagement. Their analysis shows that Americans are involved in the arts to roughly the same extent in three different modes: attending them live, enjoying them through technology, and participating in creative activities themselves. Their Venn diagram…
 

…is worth laminating and pinning to your cork board, even though it’s based on SPPA data that are far from perfect or comprehensive. (The next wave of the survey may look very different; the NEA’s research director, Sunil Iyengar, is rethinking the approach, with the help of papers like these three.)

If you add up the numbers in any one circle, you find about half of U.S. adults reporting that they engaged at least once in that mode in the past year. (Obviously, it’s not the same 50% in all three modes.) Note that the percentage of Americans who report engaging in all three ways is the same as the percentage engaging in none of these ways — the artless, we might call them, at least within the set of questions the SPPA asks. It’s roughly a quarter of the population in each case. And you won’t be surprised that the technology-participating crowd is slightly larger than the live-attending crowd; these are 2008 numbers, and I expect to see that disparity grow in coming years. ...

In the airport with my family over the holidays, I ran into a newsstand to pick up some things for our flight. There on the rack, the cover of The Economist caught my eye: “The joy of growing old (or why life begins at 46).” Being 46 at the moment, of course I bought it.

I thought the article might feature tips relevant to us mid-lifers, like how to prevent your knees from hurting when you hike, or how to remember what you walked into the kitchen for. What I found was something a little bigger-picture, something surprisingly related to my work with colleges and universities.

The not-particularly-happy news about happiness, according to the studies cited in the article, is that, in cultures around the world, people tend to start out happy and get increasingly less so, until they hit a collective rock bottom at age 46. Ouch.

The good news is that, as people continue to age, they report feeling happier and happier until their mid-80s, when (on average) they’re happier than they’ve ever been.

As I stared at the U-shaped chart, pondering all the ways I might feel happier in the future, I realized that I’ve seen this same graph before in our research with alumni.

Alumni tend to stay involved with their school for the first few years after graduation. But then engagement drops, bottoming out with alums in their 40s. It then begins to rise, with greater engagement and positive feelings as they age into retirement.

Common sense and our own research suggest that alums in their 40s are the most time-starved cohort, with jobs, kids, houses, and 401Ks taking up time and energy. So they have less time to devote to life’s optional commitments, like alumni events and class reunions. The Economist article made me wonder how happiness factors into the equation. If you don’t feel particularly good about your life, are you less likely to want to connect with your school and fellow alums? ...

This morning the American Association of Museums released the findings of its new Survey of Museum Attendance and Finances, which showed fairly widespread gains in visitorship in '09. This further complicates the picture painted by other recent studies.

AAM surveyed its member museums last month to learn, among other things, how attendance had fared in '09 compared to '08. (Full disclosure: I’m on the advisory council for AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums.) More than half (57%) of museums reported an increase, and the good news extended across most museum categories, from art to history. A whopping 81% of science and technology centers reported an increase, which makes sense given the importance of family time and entertainment during economic downturns. (We don’t know how much of the growth in this category came at the IMAX box office. Hollywood itself had a record year, at least in terms of revenue.) Yet the category that includes zoos, aquariums, nature centers, and botanic gardens — many of which also serve that family, infotainment-seeking audience — was the least likely to report gains, with only 50% saying visitation had increased. Go figure.

Some relationships that caught my eye:
 

• Museums that offer free admission were more likely to report increased attendance than ones that charge (67% vs. 55%). This puts another arrow in the quiver of advocates for free museums. Interestingly, museums with suggested admission fees performed the same as ones that charge a fixed amount, perhaps because, in practice, suggested policies often look and feel a lot like mandatory ones. (Not incidentally, more museums are charging now than in '08.) 

• Larger museums were more likely to feel economically stressed than smaller ones. This makes sense because large museums tend to have larger endowments that they’ve traditionally relied on, and investment income was the hardest-hit source of revenue (followed by corporate and government support…all of which affirms the conclusion from our first CultureQ dialogue). 

• Museums in New England were most likely to feel that economic stress, and museums in the Mountain and Plains states were least likely. This one is murkier: I’m guessing it has to do with economic factors, population shifts, and museum-specific factors such as the geographic distribution of larger-budget museums and museums that have expanded during the building boom of the last two decades.
   

An Onion headline caught my eye because it jokes about something close to home: the self-interest at the heart of many institutions’ audience research efforts.

I do empathize with the joke at the core of the article, from back in September, “University Of Illinois Researchers Find Link Between Attending University Of Illinois, Receiving Solid Education At Great Price.” Isn’t that the dream that everyone has for the audience research projects they fund or lead? How could an organization go into audience research not hoping that it emerges with a report validating its worth and proving its indispensability in stark black and white (or better yet, colorful graphs and charts)? 

(On a related note, check out a post that my colleague Cheryl wrote on advocacy vs. empiricism. She could have used the same Onion headline.)

For the people within institutions who are responsible for research, hesitation and nervous anticipation about what the study will uncover are natural. What if the report highlights the areas in which we’re most vulnerable as an organization? Areas where we fall short? Or initiatives that have cost a lot of money but haven’t yet had a measurable impact on my audience or mission? Am I supposed to feel proud to share findings like those? How will I get funders and board members to trust my decisions and open up their wallets to me after research findings like that?