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1997 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts: Summary Report

Report 39: Executive Summary

Survey cover The 1997 nationwide Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) was sponsored by the Research Division of the National Endowment for the Arts. The 1997 SPPA was conducted by Westat Corporation of Rockville, Maryland as a nationwide, stand-alone survey. Previous SPPA s had been supplements to the National Crime Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census. Although many of the questions were exactly the same as those asked in previous SPPA s, the differences in the conduct of the previous surveys make their results difficult to compare with the 1997 results. The 1997 survey design permitted a number of improvements, including a larger effective sample, more geographic details, greater flexibility in questionnaire design, and more timely reporting of the survey results, all of which improve our understanding of arts participation patterns.

From June through October of 1997 a sample of 12,349 people throughout the nation were asked questions concerning (a) their attendance at live arts events, (b) their participation in the arts through broadcast and recorded media, and (c) their personal performance or creation of art. The respondents' replies indicate that half of the U.S. adult (18 and older) population attended at least one of seven arts activities (jazz, classical music, opera, musical plays, non-musical plays, ballet, or art museums) during the previous 12 months. This would translate to 97 million different people attended one or more of these events during the year.

Thirty-five percent of American adults made at least one visit to an art museum or gallery in 1997. Because each visitor made an average of 3.3 visits per year, a total of 225 million visits were made. Other arts activities with high participation rates were musical plays (25 percent), non-musical plays and classical music (both 16 percent), and jazz and dance other than ballet (both 12 percent). Ballet and opera had attendance rates of 6 and 5 percent, respectively. Related activities such as reading literature (63 percent) and visiting a historic park or an arts/craft fair (both about 47 percent) also had high participation rates. These data are reported in detail in Table 1 (see page 15).

The 1997 SPPA also asked questions about Americans' participation in the arts through broadcast and recorded media. For jazz, classical music, opera, and musical plays, the survey covered both watching on video (television and video cassette recordings) and listening to radio and audio recordings (phonographs, cassette tapes, and compact discs); for non-musical plays both video and radio were applicable; and for dance and visual arts only video was relevant. Like prior SPPA s, the 1997 SPPA found substantially higher participation rates for broadcast and recorded media than for live event attendance. For jazz, classical music, and opera, for example, the rates of participation via these media were more than twice the rates for live arts events.

The survey data indicate that more than ten million Americans participated in each of the activities via each medium. Although dance and visual art were seen primarily via television, the other art forms attracted very large numbers of listeners to radio and recordings. An estimated eighty million Americans listened to classical music on the radio, and 67 million to recordings. For jazz the numbers were 77 and 57 million, respectively (see Table 13, page 29).

The 1997 SPPA collected data on the respondent's age, gender, race, education, and household income to permit analysis of arts participation by these socio-demographic variables. An important finding was that participants in the arts via media were more evenly distributed by race, age, income, and educational level than were participants who attended live arts events.

The 1997 SPPA asked questions about each respondent's participation in the arts by doing, that is, by personally performing or creating art. Those who replied that they participated by doing also were asked whether they performed in public or had their work displayed or published. The highest rates of personal participation in 1997 were in creative photography (17 percent), painting/drawing/sculpting (16 percent), dance other than ballet (13 percent), creative writing (12 percent), and classical music (11 percent). Weaving and other related arts also had high participation rates. The lowest rates were in jazz and opera (both 2 percent) and in ballet (less than 1 percent). Table 18 (see page 34) shows the rates and number of participants who personally performed or created art and the rates and number of participants who did so in public. Data for performing in public demonstrate the popularity of singing in groups. In 1997 more than 10 percent of the adult population-over 20 million people-sang publicly in a choir, chorus, or other ensemble.

The analysis of the demographic composition of personal performers and creators of art shows that, for most arts activities, the highest rates of participation are found among minority groups. For example, the rate of playing jazz was highest for African Americans and second highest for Hispanics. Hispanics also had high participation rates in other dance and drawing. American Indians had the highest rates of participation in other dance and photography, and Asians had the highest participation rates in opera, musical plays, ballet, drawing, and writing.

Several new questions were asked in the 1997 SPPA . Some of these new questions concerned the extent to which home computers were used in learning about the existence and details of live arts events attended by the respondents (see page 32). About 8 percent of respondents used computers for these purposes. Other questions asked whether the respondent used a home computer to create works of art. New questions also asked about subscribing to series of performances and about membership at art museums. Some questions investigated the reasons respondents did not attend a larger number of arts events and how much they paid when they did attend. Lack of time, lack of a companion, lack of suitable events, and inaccessibility were the primary deterrents to more frequent attendance at arts events. Data about companions indicate that most companions are family members, although dates and friends accompanied the respondents more than 40 percent of the time .

Several questions asked about socialization in the arts, particularly addressing the amount of exposure to the arts the respondents received as children, the lessons and classes they took at any time during their lives, and how much they were exposing their own children to art. Respondents exposed their own children to the arts at rates similar to their own exposures (see Table 24, page 42). Other questions investigated the respondents' music preferences and determined that the rank orders were quite similar to those found in 1992 (see Table 29, page 48).

Respondents were asked about their rates of participation in leisure activities other than the arts. When the responses were grouped in terms of flexibility of place and time of participation and compared with groups of arts activities with similar characteristics, the patterns of public participation were very similar for arts and other activities (see Table 26, page 44).

Detailed geographical information was collected in the 1997 SPPA . All the data relate to the respondent's residence zip code, not where the arts activity took place. Small samples made comparison difficult for some arts activities and some geographical areas. The data were reported for seven metropolitan areas, ten individual states, and nine regions that include all 50 states (see pages 49Ü55). Rates of participation, total attenders, and total attendance were tabulated for each geographical component for each live arts activity, and the rate of participation was tabulated for each form of participation via broadcast or recorded media. This information not only will allow for more analysis of geographical differences in arts participation in 1997, but also provide a baseline for future surveys to analyze geographical variables in arts participation over time.

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