Methodological Approaches in Studying European Theatre Audiences: Challenges in Survey Design and Data Analysis in the Context of International Comparative Research

This presentation is part of a panel and draws on the experiences within one of the largest coordinated efforts to survey the theatrical audience experience, the City Study of the Project on European Theatre Systems, which conducted large-scale quantitative research and dozens of qualitative interviews and focus groups with audience members from four mid-sized, decentralised (non-capital) cities across Europe. The study aimed to capture the details of how audiences perceive and value theatre, and resulted in a data set which, while imperfect, has no precedent in scale and comparability for theatre studies, as far as we are aware of. To create this data set, however, STEP had to develop its own methods for understanding and capturing the theatrical audience experience, which evolved over the study, some more successfully than others.
This presentation will discuss the methodological choices underpinning the development of the survey for the study, the analytical approach that we took to compare the survey results from the individual cities and the challenges that come with this type of comparative international research. I will outline how the city-survey stands in line with two distinct threads in the history of audience and reception research: first, the audience research grounded in demographics and sociology; and second, the more psychologically-based reception research. This is reflected in the survey's aims; 1) to get insight into the demographic background of audiences in the four cities where the survey was distributed and in addition, to measure the use these audiences made of the supply in these cities (see also the first presentation in this panel). The aim of gathering the latter was to enable a calculation or at least an estimate of how many inhabitants of a city actually make use of (which parts of) the theatre supply and how often they do so, by genre and venue. 2) to get insight into the nature of the experiences generated and the values attached to these experiences amongst the audiences in these cities. I will discuss the operationalisation of theoretical notions about the theatrical experience into survey questions; for grasping the
experiential values, the survey questions are derived from the thematic, narrative, theatrical, communicative and contextual dimensions of the performance according to the TEAM (Theatrical Event Analysis Model). One of the challenges that comes with comparative research in different language area’s, is that the survey had to be translated to the local languages concerned. I will highlight the discussion needed to correctly translate terms in the respective languages and to fit the particular cultural context considering the way people speak about theatre in their respective culture and language the best.