Methods in International and Interdisciplinary Audience Research: the Project on European Theatre Systems

Wilders, M. (Speaker)
Joshua Edelman (Speaker)
Maja Sorli (Speaker)
Attila Szábo (Speaker)

Department of Humanities

Activity: Talk and presentation › Academic presentation › Academic

Description

This roundtable brings together members of the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP), an international group of sociologically-minded European theatre scholars. In 2009 STEP published its first book, Global Changes/Local Stages, in which it investigated how theatre functions in smaller European countries. In designing its next step, that is, its City Study, the group standardized the methodology and researched theatre systems through the prism of selected cities in individual countries. The study compares European theatre systems and covers the fields of theatre audiences, reception, cultural policy and theatre sociology. The study compared the theatre systems and the annual supply of theatrical events, divided between production and distribution, but also audience demographics and the experience of the audiences who visit different theatre types in the four cities where audience and reception research was performed; Groningen (NL), Tartu (EE) Debrecen (HU) and Newcastle (Tyneside) (UK). The audience and reception research took place between 2010-2014 and was conducted with an extensive questionnaire, which was completed with qualitative research that comprised of focus groups and interviews with audience members. In this round table, we will discuss and reflect on the possibilities and challenges in the development of collaborative (international) audience research, what we have learned from applying mixed methodologies in different cultural contexts and how we would suggest that others develop this method for their own projects. Furthermore we will present some of our comparative results which were published in Amfiteater, and some new results that were drawn from parts of the data set on the notion of the
relevance of theatrical events and on the relationship between complexity and competence within spectator’s experiences. The STEP City Study was published in a special issue of Amfiteater, volume 3 (2015), available online at https://issuu.com/ul_agrft/docs/amfiteater__web_3pika1-2

Period	5-Jul-2019
Event title	Audience Research in the Arts Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Sheffield, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International

Keywords

audience research

Documents & Links

This roundtable brings together members of the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP), aninternational group of sociologically-minded European theatre scholars. In 2009 STEP published its first book, Global Changes/Local Stages, in which it investigated how theatre functions in smallerEuropean countries. In designing its next step, that is, its City Study, the group standardized the methodology and researched theatre systems through the prism of selected cities in individual countries. The study compares European theatre systems and covers the fields of theatre audiences, reception, cultural policy and theatre sociology. The study compared the theatre systems and the annual supply of theatrical events, divided between production and distribution, but also audience demographics and the experience of the audiences who visit different theatre types in the four cities where audience and reception research was performed; Groningen (NL), Tartu (EE) Debrecen (HU) and Newcastle (Tyneside) (UK). The audience and reception research took place between 2010-2014 and was conducted with an extensive questionnaire, which was completed with qualitative research that comprised of focus groups and interviews with audience members. In this round table, we will discuss and reflect on the possibilities and challenges in the development of collaborative (international) audience research, what we have learned from applying mixed methodologies in different cultural contexts and how we would suggest that others develop this method for their own projects. Furthermore we will present some of our comparative results which were published in Amfiteater, and some new results that were drawn from parts of the data set on the notion of the relevance of theatrical events and on the relationship between complexity and competence within spectator’s experiences. The STEP City Study was published in a special issue of Amfiteater, volume 3 (2015), available online at https://issuu.com/ul_agrft/docs/amfiteater__web_3pika1-2