MusLi (Museums Literacy) - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

28 MusLi - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences
Monitor and evaluate the activities
The evaluation of activities addressed to “new” and “hard to reach” audiences is fundamental in monitoring
the achievement of expected outcomes and, having registered difficulties in the implementation,
putting into practice the necessary improvements.
For the nature of these activities, as they have been analysed here – that is to say contact, relationships
and confidence building, listening to audiences (their representations, expectations and needs), the
recording of the variable systems of constraints, dialogue and interaction – getting closer to irregular
visitors will always be experimental and requires a high level of flexibility and adaptation to variable
conditions.
Becoming better at defining the initial objectives and noting the variations along the way is, therefore,
a permanent learning process for the project managers themselves.
It must be stressed that deviation from project objectives does not always represent a fault or a failure.
The plurality of expectations and representations stated at the beginning of a project – those of the
museum on the one hand and of audiences on the other – makes it impossible to anticipate or observe
the final effects of the projects according to a set of given parameters.
The consequent evaluation – especially if addressed to the impact of the activities on the participants,
both internal or external to the museum – has to make use of qualitative methods and to adapt to the
emergence of multiple and also unexpected results, which can lead to positive outcomes translated, in
a retroactive way, into a change of attitudes and operational criteria of the museum itself.
One of the merits of this project is, amongst others, to have carried out parallel and convergent evaluations
on the different case studies illustrated here. It is clearly only an outline process, since the differences
in methodologies have inevitably been retained and the amount of data at our disposal is really
moderate, which does not allow us to draw definite conclusions.
Cautions regarding the analysis of the target audiences
Great caution has to be shown when choosing methodologies for observation of and consultation with
these audiences, especially when particularly culturally deprived subjects are involved.
The issue has long been investigated by sociological analysis 3 : reticence regarding specific aspects
of cultural or cognitive discomfort or deficit, as well as a difficulty in understanding a set of questions
can threaten the rigour of results produced by “traditional” tools of analysis, such as questionnaires or
interviews, some of which have been used for the analysis of audiences in different cases illustrated
here.
Without opening up a debate into very complex and already broadly discussed issues, some recommendations
are summarised below. They are shared by the project partners and at the heart of choices
adopted in audience research carried out within Museums Literacy:
3 See Kenneth D. Bailey, Methods of Social Research. New York: Free Press, 1978; Allen Rubin, Earl R. Babbie, Research Methods for Social Work, Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth/Thompson Learning 2001 (5 th Ed.)