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Cultural considerations themselves need to be taken into account in questionnaire design. For
example, there are many cultures in which members of a lower class or a minority will not say
‘no’ in response to a question from a socially superior interviewer. Design responses can include
more use of open questions and varying the expected or more threatening response from ‘no’ to
‘yes’. Using interviewers of a similar social standing to the respondent is a further design
response to encourage openness and ownership in local communities.
Another common design problem is the use of inappropriate examples in questions. A core
cultural participation survey in developed countries asks about the presence of books at home,
but it may not be understood in poor rural areas, where the whole idea of ownership of a book
may be strange and confusing.
Good design or branching can be used to avoid using inappropriate questions. It can be
embarrassing as an interviewer to go into a poor hut and ask about numbers of televisions,
when the house patently has no electricity supply. First ask about the electricity if necessary,
and then consider appliances if the response is positive.
3.3.2 Population and sampling
The objective of any survey on cultural participation should be to extract information about the
target population, whether this be the population of the country as a whole or a particular
geographically or socially defined group (UNESCO-UIS, 2006). This issue is of particular
importance in those countries with an ethnically or socially diverse composition, the presence of
different minority groups, or great differences in access to cultural infrastructure as between
urban and rural areas. These factors obviously complicate intentions to provide a
comprehensive picture of the widest possible population and often require larger, more
expensive samples to obtain accurate results.
A further problem relates to age. In principle, surveys should be addressed to the population as
a whole, most studies actually focus on the participation of the adult population (and there is no
uniformity in how “adult” is to be defined). With the exception of a few cases (in Italy its “Citizens
and free time” survey considers all persons of 6 years and older), the majority of studies count
15 to 16 year olds and over as adult individuals, but great differences still exist between
countries. The United States, for example, uses 18 years old as the starting point for its SPPA
studies and the same goes for Uganda (for the section of “Uganda National Household Survey”
dedicated to cultural participation). Assuming that cultural participation is a conscious act, a
survey including very young people (e.g. 3-year-olds) must pose concerns about the actual
awareness of the respondent. Moreover, children of school age often take part in cultural
activities or visit cultural venues as part of their school curriculum. Such cultural participation
deserves specific attention and might be better recorded in a survey undertaken at school. FCS
(UNESCO-UIS, 2009) emphasises the important role of education in imparting cultural values
and the transmission of cultural identities between generations.
In some cases, mainly because of logistical problems, surveys do not take account of the
population living in small centres or in remote areas. The 2009 Uruguay “Imaginarios y Consumo
Cultural” survey, for example, considers only the population over 16 years old living in towns or
cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants.
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