NESTA PROJECT: FINE ARTSITS AND INNOVATION

• Artists’ careers and labour markets: how these are
defined and what has emerged from recent studies of
artists' employment, income and career development,
including multiple jobholding and spillover between arts
and non-arts sectors.
• The training and education of artists: the skills and
attitudes which shape artistic practice, professionalism
and ways of working both inside and outside of the arts.
Online survey
We use an online survey for several reasons: speed of
response makes a postal questionnaire impractical; we
believe response rates would be lower in a postal survey;
and the data are considerably more difficult to analyse.
Online surveys enable more answer options, permit more
interaction, and facilitate skip patterns with questions – all of
which are particularly useful for a complex, biographical
approach.
There is some evidence (Markusen, Gilmore, Johnson, Levi
and Martinez, 2006) that response rates for online surveys are
higher than for postal surveys and yield longer and more
original answers to qualitative questions. A telephone survey
is more costly, and does not allow the respondents to answer
‘in their own time’. We were initially worried that we might
not reach as many older respondents, or that they may be
less willing to fill in an online survey, but these concerns have
proven to be unfounded.
For this project, the research team has negotiated unique
access to a previously unused database of UAL alumni who
have studied fine art at one of the University’s constituent
colleges. The database includes those who have studied
painting, sculpture, fine art photography, fine art film and
video or combined arts as undergraduates or postgraduates.
The survey has been initially emailed to 8,005 addresses via
the alumni association. We believe this route engenders
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