CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Dervin, B., Wyszomirski, M., & Foreman-Wernet, L. (2000, October). How hidden depths and everyday secrets can inform arts policy and practice: Audience sense-making of the arts as lived experience. Paper presented at the annual Conference on Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts, Washington, DC.
© Brenda Dervin, Margaret Wyszomirski , and Lois Foreman-Wernet (2000).

ABSTRACT:
Our project responds to the arts policy call for better understandings of arts audiences — actual, potential, and disinterested. We report on the application of the Sense-Making Methodology to audience research. Sense-Making is an approach developed specifically for providing data directly useful to informing policies and practices of institutions mandated to serve publics. We review five sample applications drawn from two years of exploratory work and a total of some 1000 different interviewing encounters. We conclude with an impressionistic overview of patterns emerging from our analyses to date, illustrating potentials and relating these to implications for policy and practice.

What is different about our approach in comparison with more traditional audience/visitor research is that it focuses: (1) on the reasons behind audience actions and attitudes rather than only on the actions and attitudes themselves; (2) on emotions, feelings, and intuitions as well as cognitions, opinions, and attitudes; (3) on instances of use and changes over time rather than only on audiences characterized demographically or in terms of other enduring attributes; (4) not only on what audiences experience but on their visions of unrealized possibilities; (5) on comparing the different categories used by audiences for evaluating the usefulness and meaning of arts encounters versus those used by arts professionals; (6) on mapping the differences and similarities between views of the arts and arts institutions held by audiences versus those held by professionals; and (7) on the simultaneous use of both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

What these differences allow us to do is systematically: (1) address the lifeworlds which inform audience relationships with the arts and their institutions; (2) analyze and find patterns in both the instabilities and stabilities of audience actions and attitudes over time; and (3) introduce alternative explanations of actions and attitudes other than the usual demographic and life style profiles. Together, these potentials allow us to derive portraits of not only what audiences do and do not do, but also why and why not, and how institutional policies and practices can be changed if the goal is to reach and serve more people or different audience sectors.

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OTHER MATERIALS BY THESE AUTHORS ON THIS WEB SITE:
For Dervin,
See:  http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistdervin.html
For Wyszomirski,
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistwyszomirski.html
For Foreman-Wernet,
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistforemanwernet.html