Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques

Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques is a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts that summarizes a convening held at the Gallup Headquarters in Washington, DC, in June of 2014. The NEA and the Cultural Value Project (CVP) of the United Kingdom’s Arts & Humanities Research Council convened leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from a handful of countries to challenge assumptions about how and why public involvement in arts and culture is measured and to identify research needs and opportunities to promote more meaningful measurement.

The symposium was organized into five sessions over two days:

1. Why measure cultural participation, and for and by whom?
2. What do we mean by cultural participation? Scrutinizing activities and genres
3. The challenge of encompassing new media- and technology-driven forms of participation
4. New ways of knowing: alternative data sources, methodologies, and units of analysis
5. Beyond participation rates: understanding motivations, barriers, and outcome

Get the full report.