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. 

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.