Adult education in the art museum: a content analysis of acoustical guides in American art museums

This study was concerned with identifying, describing, and analyzing the content components of selected transcripts of acoustical guides used in major American art museums to aid adult audiences in interpreting or enjoying the art on exhibit. The principal objectives of the research were to characterize the content of these recorded tours and to analyze patterns of content emphasis among museums. Additionally, the study examined the general availability and use of recorded tours, the audiences for which they were designed, the authorship of scripts, the basis for decisions about script content, and the script preparation and production processes.

Acoustical tour guide transcripts from ten major American art museums, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Center, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, provided the material for content analysis.

A questionnaire to collect background information and to identify the accessible population was developed, mailed to, and returned by forty-eight art museums in the forty largest American cities. A content analysis instrument was developed for the study which characterized the transcript content in thirteen categories reflecting distinct differences in content emphasis. In all, 10,477 sentence and phrase units from thirty-eight full-length and thirty-three short recorded tour transcripts from ten art museums were categorized.

Data resulting from the content analysis were tabulated and presented descriptively and statistically. Descriptive analysis consisted of frequency distributions of content units classified by content category; statistical analysis employed the chi-square test to test for the independence of content distribution and particular museums and exhibition types which the recorded tours accompanied.

Statistical tests of the independence of content, museums, and exhibition types indicated a lack of independence among them.

Patterns of content in recorded tours reflected a predominantly descriptive and specific orientation: commentary was generally more objective than subjective, more pedagogical than andragogical, more declarative than interactive, more concrete than abstract. General Description or Explanation and Art Historical Context accounted for the highest frequencies of content units. Relatively little transcript content was interpretive, evaluative, or abstract. Almost no specific references were made to the philosophy or psychology of art or to multiple ways of approaching the art experience.

It was recommended that script authors consider writing more subjectively, more qualitatively, more poetically for the adult audience; that allusions be made to issues in the psychology and philosophy of art; that there be more interactive andragogical approaches to museum visitors; that objectives of this educational medium be clearly identified so that effectiveness can be measured; that alternative approaches to the communication of facts and ideas be explored; and that audio tours warrant more active promotion within museums that have them and reconsideration by museums that doubt their educational effectiveness.