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cultural experience or whether the experience only becomes a cultural experience
once cognition, meaning and emotion set in.
While biometric measures of impact are not a focus of this review, they represent
an important frontier in measurement. Moreover, any conceptual framework for
impact that ignores the immediate physiological effects of cultural experiences –
regardless of the difficulties in measurement – would be incomplete.
Post-event surveying
The literature that is more centrally engaged with concepts of individual impact
generally draws its data from subjective, retrospective reporting from participants,
attendees and audience members. Within this literature methodological differences
remain in the manner in which the data is collected, when it is collected and
whether the participants are questioned about specific events or about cultural
experiences in general.
Over the past 15 years, researchers have increasingly turned to post-event surveys
to ask respondents to report on various aspects of their cultural experiences.
Some of these surveys are strictly quantitative, while others incorporate both
quantitative measures and open-ended questions in order to gain a more complex
understanding of the internal responses that artistic experiences provoke in
viewers. While the approach is similar to consumer satisfaction surveys that are
used in market research, these studies try to gain a broad understanding of the
multiple facets of the experience rather than generating simplistic measures of
loyalty or satisfaction.
Several of these studies offer conceptual frameworks for individual impacts, subdividing
the various impacts into categories or ‘constructs’, often based on the
authors’ own literature reviews, while others have developed indicators of impact
in pursuit of a particular research hypothesis, or consulted with artists and administrators
in developing an original framework for impact or quality. Table 1,
below, roughly illustrates how the constructs of individual impacts align across
several of the key quantitative studies reviewed for this paper, and begins to
suggest some of the definitional disparities across studies.
Measuring Individual Impact: Physiological and psychometric responses measured during the experience 62
UNDERSTANDING the value and impacts of cultural experiences