Row X blog guest post by Matthew Reason, Professor of Theatre and Performance at York St John University, UK.
This is the third in a series on Row X will be featuring short essays written by the co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, a major reference work published in April 2022. The series is introduced here.
The Companion represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance. Spread over four sections and featuring the research and thinking of sixty international contributing authors, the volume considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within current conversations in the field of audience research.
The chapter “Ethics in Audience Research: By the Book or on the Hop?” by Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow is available for free to everyone. Follow this link, then click on “Open access content is available for this title” to access the chapter.
Post your comments and questions to X readers to engage with us about important issues central to audience research.
Our Methods Make Our World: Methods, Methodologies and Understanding Audiences
In his book What Good are the Arts? John Carey provocatively declares the impossibility of audience research, writing: ‘We have no means of knowing the inner experience of other people, and therefore no means of judging the kind of pleasure they get from whatever happens to give them pleasure’ (2005, 23).
There are multiple reasons we might be sympathetic to this description of impossibility. Audience experiences unfold over time, in response to often ephemeral stimulus, in a public environment and in the presence of other people. Audiences are at once visible, audible, tangibly present; yet perhaps the majority of what we might consider their experience is private and inaccessible. And then there are questions about what exactly we are researching. Are we interested in individual responses, or in describing patterns that are applicable across large numbers? Are we interested in the sensorial responses experienced in the moment, or in processes of meaning making that might come afterwards? Do we include the social experience alongside the aesthetic?
Part Three of the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts is titled ‘Methods, Methodologies and Understanding Audiences,’ and demonstrates the innovative and emerging ways in which researchers have sought to overcome the impossibility seemingly at the core of audience research.
The methods that are utilised in this endeavour and which are presented in this section range from scanning spectators’ brains (Corinne Jola, Chapter 18), to asking them survey questions (Wing Tung Au et al. Chapter 21), to requesting they draw a picture (Matthew Reason, Chapter 23), to having coffee with them (Stephanie Pitts and Sarah Price Chapter 22), to real-time measurements of neural or physiological activity (LS Merritt Millman et al. Chapter 19; Patrick Healey et al. Chapter 20). Meanwhile Emma McDowell (Chapter 17) considers what happens if we mix all these approaches up; while Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow (Chapter 24) reflect on the ethics of it all. Before any of these chapters, this section is introduced by a conversation with Martin Barker (Chapter 16), who, from his position as researcher of film and media audiences, has observed the development of audience research in the performing arts. He has also witnessed the sometimes fraught and marginalised history of performing arts engagement with empirical audience research, suggesting it has been produced by a variety of interlocking factors, including disciplinary restrictions, skills and training, fear and also belief in something akin to Carey’s description of impossibility. Across these different chapters, the contributors reflect on their methods, and the relationship between what they are researching and how they research.
Consideration of this relationship is at the core of the chapters in this section: how we research determines what we will uncover: in terms of its content, form, nature, style, its claims to reliability and more. The reverse is also the case: what we want to research should determine how we go about the process and what methods we select. If we want to formulate new overarching concepts about spectatorship, if we want to account for the particularity of different lived experiences, if we want to describe physiological responses – then we reach for and utilise a different method. In my own chapter within the Companion I describe this in terms of ‘affordances,’ a concept typically applied to design that describes how the properties of an object align with its intended use. This is why, for example, the handle of a kettle is not positioned right in front of the spout. Applying the notion of affordances to research methods reminds us that our method should naturally and easily align with the function or focus of our enquiry. What does it allow us to ask and discover with the elegance and ease of good design?
Away from academic research, there are insights here for artists and arts organisations – even if some of the resources here might be beyond the scope of the average theatre company (although it might be interesting to include the costs of an fMRI scanner in the next funding round!). While hugely diverse, the chapters in this section all share one absolutely vital quality, which starts and ends with an open criticality about the limits, scope and potential for any particular methodology. It is this attitude and self-reflexivity, beyond the specifics of any particular method, that is the true marker of good research design, whether carried out on large or small scale, within a university or by a marketing department. The chapters here should also push our boundaries and understanding of what we might ask about audiences, and encourage more innovative research that asks more ambitious questions.
Our methods make our world. The methods we use to research audiences determine not just what we find out, but also what we conceptually consider audiences to be in the first place. And, indeed, what we consider to be of value about the performing arts themselves. The complexity of audiences and audiencing requires the full spectrum of methods and methodologies presented in this Companion. Not because we will reach a final and absolute answer by combining them all in some fantasy of the perfect research enquiry. No matter our methods, we will never pin down audiences like a butterfly in a glass case; nor will empirical methods render theoretical and philosophical investigations of performance redundant. Not only is neither of these the objective, neither of them is possible. Instead, the reverse is the case: the closer we look, the more complex and elusive audiences become. Let’s celebrate that.
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