The City Survey: Quantitative Audience and Reception Research Methods

This chapter will discuss the STEP City Survey, the tool that we employed to gather quantitative data on audience compositions and audience experiences within the context of the STEP City Study. The main goal, and at the same time, the challenge in the creation of such a tool, was to design a comparative survey that could be used across different theatre systems and different theatre audiences. This tool would additionally need to serve the requirement of comparability, while living up to the demand for the incorporation of local and cultural differences inherent to the theatre life and supply of theatre in the different cities. In this chapter the theoretical underpinnings, the set-up of the survey developed for the STEP City Study, the challenges we encountered and the study’s usefulness in contributing to its aims along with its limitations will be addressed. As we move through the set-up of the questionnaire, category by category and question by question, the underlying goals of certain questions or question categories will be discussed and the ways in which combining certain data could yield insight into the research questions that were part of the City study will be noted (see Chapter 1). Also, critical comments will be made on how we as STEP City researchers retrospectively evaluated the usefulness of some of these questions in contributing to their aim and the aims of the survey in general. Appendix B contains the so-called “mother questionnaire” in English which consists of 21 questions and was developed over the course of several STEP meetings between 2008 and 2010 in Groningen (2008), Lisbon (2009) and Munich (2010).