“It only takes a second to fill out,” the x-ray technician told me cheerfully after an MRI I had yesterday. He was explaining that I would soon receive a survey in the mail asking about the service he provided, and he mimed checking off the boxes: “You just go down the list, five, five, five, five…”

Five, as you may have guessed, is the top satisfaction score.

Now, this was a community hospital affiliated with the University of Chicago Medical Center (which is a client of ours). But it’s an example of how all kinds of educational and cultural nonprofits could be thinking about the relationship between customer feedback, staff performance, and the bottom line.

At first it rubbed me the wrong way. My colleagues and I pride ourselves on being rigorous researchers, and we’ve criticized (here and here) survey processes that are less than scientific and objective. The whole point of social and market research is to get a true picture of how people think, feel, and act. You’re not allowed to coach them to give you high marks; you’re not supposed to influence them in any way.

But there was something else going on here, and it made me look more deeply at the role this kind of satisfaction research plays.

My tech’s name was Leo, which he wrote on the card he gave me so I would be sure to put it on the survey. Unprompted by any questions from me, he explained that the survey was a big part of the culture at the hospital. “We strive for five” is a staff mantra. At weekly meetings in each department, workers who received good survey ratings or comments are recognized. This presumably factors into their promotion and salary trajectories.

He even told me that the insurance companies link their reimbursement amounts to those patient satisfaction scores. I don’t know whether this is true or how much of the hospital’s revenue might be at stake in the formula. But what’s important is that Leo and his colleagues see the financial performance of the institution as dependent on the quality of the experiences it provides to individuals like me. ...

When you factor in personal art-making and participation in alternative, informal art forms, are the arts as a category occupying a smaller or larger share of America’s hearts and minds? The answer may depend on how we define “arts.”

There’s a moment toward the end of The Philadelphia Story when Katherine Hepburn’s character, hung over and confused about who she is and what she should want, laments to Cary Grant, “What am I supposed to think when I — I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” To which Grant’s character replies with the hint of a smile, “That sounds very hopeful, Red. That sounds just fine.”

We reached a moment like Hepburn’s at a small gathering of arts professionals I attended this week here in Chicago. The occasion was a visit by Sunil Iyengar, head of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, to present an overview of the agency’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and hear previews from two Chicago-based researchers who are writing papers analyzing the SPPA data from particular angles: Jennifer Novak-Leonard from WolfBrown on arts creation, and Nick Rabkin from the University of Chicago on arts education. (Both are going to be terrific studies, by way.)

Inevitably, the conversation in the room turned quickly into what the SPPA data leaves out, just as it has at other recent gatherings about national arts statistics (including Sunil’s own webcast conference in Washington in December and last week’s by Randy Cohen in Chicago about the new National Arts Index from Americans for the Arts).

Okay, attendance is declining at the traditional, presentational arts formats that lie at the core of the NEA study. But what about people learning to play the guitar, singing in amateur choruses, and going to salsa clubs where they both participate and watch? What about all those technologically-mediated forms of spectatorship and creation? Many of the creative, expressive things that people are doing are captured only partially in studies like the SPPA and even the broader NAI, if at all.
 

So we’re missing part of the picture, and we have some sketchy evidence that the part we’re missing looks rosier than the part we have.

The big question, as Paul Botts, a program director at the Donnelley Foundation, put it at this week’s meeting, is whether that overall picture is growing or shrinking. Are the arts occupying less or more of Americans’ time and attention? ...