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Outside shot of the a museum with a crowd of people in front of it. One person is holding up a blue flag with the Birmingham Museums Trust logo.

Addressing the museum attendance and benefit gap

Inequality, representative participation and implementation science

This Network is exploring who visits and benefits from museums, who is missing from museum audiences and how we can utilise data and evidence-based approaches to broaden visitor demographics and make sustainable progress towards representative participation.

The project

Museums are publicly supported institutions, either through direct taxpayer funding or through charitable status, which confers numerous tax and other financial benefits as well as social credibility. The public nature of museums also means that they have a legal obligation to work in ways that challenge discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people. The legal and ethical implication of museums’ public status is not that everyone should visit museums, but that museum audiences should be broadly representative of society. Where museum audiences are not representative, museums have an obligation to explain why these inequalities exist and what they are doing to address them.

Nationally and internationally, audiences are far from representative of the wider society. Museum visiting reflects the socio-economic gradient, closely tracking inequalities in education, income, employment, mental health and other indicators of social wellbeing. A vast array of sociological research shows that people who participate in and benefit from museums hold more formal qualifications and are financially better off than those who do not participate.

Decades of concerted efforts by museums of all genres and scales, supported by national and local government policy and targeted investment, including more than £5 billion of Lottery Funding, have not reduced this gap. The unfairness of this status quo and the ways in which this adds to health inequalities is made clear in population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture which focus on the distribution of illness and which tell us that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits.

While pockets of positive transformation which successfully challenge the conventional norms and processes of museums that benefit already advantaged groups and limit change have been achieved, museums have struggled to find ways to understand, consolidate, share and sustain progress.

In order to address persistent inequalities in museum attendance and benefit, this AHRC-funded Research Network brings together: scholars from a range of disciplines including sociology, museum studies, health and implementation science; leaders from a group of UK museums committed to transforming museums so that everyone benefits from them; and leaders from key professional, policy and funding organisations with the agency to drive change across the sector.

Together we are asking: How can we better understand who visits and benefits from museums? What can existing population-level and museum data tell us about those who visit and those who do not? What research can museums committed to representative participation draw on to understand audience development more strategically? How might museums utilise research and strategies from fields such as implementation science to drive evidence-based decision making, understand which changes in museums successfully broaden visitor demographics and sustain progress towards representative participation?

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Images courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust