Audience Data and Research

This book presents a wide range of new audience studies research in the performing arts to provide a diversity of perspectives from scholarship, policy, management and practice. It explores the insights different methodologies, carried out with different kinds of audiences, can contribute both to our immediate understanding of audiences and to the future development of audience research.

The book showcases research across the myriad fields that contribute to audience scholarship, highlighting the ability of audience research to engage thinkers and practitioners, from across often falsely divided art forms and academic fields. Together in one volume, these different methodologies explore the potential complementarity of evolving approaches to audience research and provide an in-depth opportunity for investigating innovative methods. Focusing on the need to understand audiences in a deeper and richer way, this volume offers a crucible of thinking and re-thinking about how society understands the impact of arts and culture on audiences.

Audience Data and Research: Perspectives from Cultural Policy, Arts Management and Practice serves as a catalyst to stimulate new critical debate on the potential of empirical audience research to provide fresh insights into questions of audience enrichment and cultural value. It will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of audience studies, media and cultural studies, performance arts research, arts management, and cultural policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Trends.

Steven Hadley is an academic, consultant and researcher working internationally in arts management, cultural policy and audience engagement. He is currently a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Steven sits on the Steering Committee of the Cultural Research Network, the Editorial Board of Arts and the Market and is Policy & Reviews Editor for Cultural Trends. His recent books include Audience Development and Cultural Policy (2021).

Katya Johanson is Associate Dean, Creative Humanities at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. For over 20 years, Katya has researched the ways in which audiences engage with creative productions and assisted arts and cultural policy agencies to respond to these patterns. Katya is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Audiences and Performance (2022).

Ben Walmsley is Dean of Cultural Engagement at the University of Leeds (UK) and Director of the Centre for Cultural Value. Prior to his academic career, Ben worked as an arts manager for ten years, most recently as Producer at the National Theatre of Scotland. He is an Expert Advisor for the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Anne Torreggiani is founding CEO of The Audience Agency - a UK charity for research and development in cultural participation - and Co-Director of Centre for Cultural Value at University of Leeds. She is a specialist in audience research, data and trends with particular interest in human centred design and organisational change. She works as a facilitator and adviser.