Search for: All records

Museum workers believe that museums are critical vectors for social change. The 2022 ICOM definition of museums made claimed that museums are necessary for fixing social wrongs, paths for cultural diplomacy, and venues for advancing a sustainable future. Unfortunately, there seems to be a scarcity of evidence to back up these social impact claims. An effort to synthesize research in the USA published in the first two decades of the 21st century sought to describe what can be considered common understanding in the museum field about how social issues and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) come together in museum practice. Our study focused on the methods and data reporting: we examined where claims may overshoot what should be considered generalizable fact. To do that, we analyzed a subset of papers assembled through a configurative review of the Museums, STEM, and Social Issues domain in the USA.1 The initial review described the topics and types of research related to our focal subject. Here, we focus on the choices made about the research methods. By selecting only those papers that assessed the intersection of STEM and social issues in museums, we were able to look across three primary sources of knowledge: peer-reviewed journals, grey literature from a national online repository, and dissertations or theses in the ProQuest database. We used these reports to understand whether there is sufficient evidence to make claims about the museum sector or museums as a class capable of supporting the many claims about their impacts. In this case, we focused only on museums’ capacity to use STEM to engage audiences with social issues and acknowledge the exclusion of humanities content as a path for social change. 

This research synthesizes recent literature about the ways the informal learning field is engaging with social issues, with a specific focus on the position of STEM knowledge in those efforts. Through a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles, research reports, and graduate theses, we found many topics highly ranked in public surveys were being addressed, with many notable exceptions. Much of the research examined presents social issues isolated from complex, intertwined societal structures, although some emerging efforts did focus on the societal context of social issues. Our analysis suggests a strong role for the field as knowledge brokers for understanding social issues but also a need to broaden the range of topics and to more deliberately and transparently include the societal context and structural nature of social issues. The review concludes with a call for more cross-disciplinary and cross-sector efforts. 

Research that involves a large and broad sample of museums can produce a representative picture of the entire museum sector and lead to global insights that may not be attainable through a more local lens. However, many museum research projects use a small sample of museums, meant to represent the entire field. We propose a research method that distributes data collection across a broad swath of museums to provide local detail that can be used to assemble a collective picture on a topic of interest to the field. This method, called crowdsourced data collection, was used in a yearlong study of zoos and aquariums in North America, in which 95 institutions were asked to collect data for one to two survey modules per month. We hoped this approach would produce data comparable to data gathered with conventional methods and reduce burden on participating institutions. We found the method replicated nationally representative studies with two validated scales. While only one third of the institutions completed all modules, institutions typically did 8-9 modules, with only slight decreases in the probability of completing the study over time. These results suggest researchers can use crowdsourced data collection to reliably study the museum sector. We also discuss the challenges of this method for researchers and institutions participating as data collection sites. 

Numbers don’t speak for themselves – yet taking numbers for granted (numerism) is widespread. In fact, journalists often rely heavily on numbers precisely because they are widely considered objective. As a team of journalists and social scientists, we undertook a qualitative exploration of clauses and entire news reports that are particularly quantitatively dense. The dense clauses were often grammatically complex and assumed familiarity with sophisticated concepts. They were rarely associated with explanations of data collection methods. Meanwhile, the dense news reports were all about economy or health topics, chiefly brief updates on an ongoing event (e.g., stock market fluctuations; COVID-19 cases). We suggest that journalists can support public understanding by: * Providing more detail about research methods; * Writing shorter, clearer sentences; * Providing context behind statistics; * Being transparent about uncertainty; and * Indicating where consensus lies. We also encourage news organizations to consider structural changes like rethinking their relationship with newswires and working closely with statisticians. 

Abstract Prior research into the conceptual underpinnings of the public's institutional trust in zoos and aquariums has suggested a range of ethical dimensions that set these types of cultural institutions apart from others in the museum sector. As the recognized holders, care‐takers, and nurturers of wild animals, zoos and aquariums are sustained at least in part by the public's perception that these activities are legitimate pursuits and essential to the long‐term conservation of the natural world. This paper builds on recent research that identified the ethical dimensions of trust in zoos and aquariums and assessed their distribution among the U.S. public by analyzing survey responses with respect to the importance of trust criteria. We hypothesized that distinct clusters of individuals, as defined by their response to trust criteria items, would emerge and that these clusters would prioritize different dimensions in their trust of zoos and aquariums. Usingk‐means clustering, we identified four relevant clusters of individuals on seven dimensions of institutional trust in zoos and aquariums. Based on these clusters, we suggest strategies for addressing what may be necessary for zoos and aquariums to claim authority as agents promoting conservation behaviors in society.