1st Edition

Studying European Theatre Audiences The STEP City Study

Edited By Joshua Edelman, Attila Szabó, Hedi-Liis Toome, Marline Lisette Wilders, Antine Zijlstra

This book reports on one of the largest co-ordinated efforts to survey the theatrical audience experience: the City Study of the Project on European Theatre Systems, which conducted over 7000 surveys and dozens of interviews and focus groups with audience members from four mid-sized cities across Europe. This study aimed to capture the details of how audiences perceive and value theatre, and resulted in a data set which, while imperfect, has no precedent in scale and comparability for theatre studies. Based on this very large data set, the authors were able to create a portrait of varied segments of European theatrical audiences, its experiences, and how it values theatre, that is more detailed and incisive than any previously available. The question is not just who comes to theatre, but why, and how those experiences are valuable to them. This book’s key contribution, however, is methodological that offers a detailed and unsparing examination of the City Study’s working methods: their underlying theory, their strengths and weaknesses, and which survey and interview techniques were more successful in bringing out useful information. This makes this book essential reading for those interested in studying theatre's place in society, but also for artists, policy makers, and arts professionals who want to make and share work with an understanding of their audience’s engagement with it.
Chapter 8 Qualitative Research on Theatre Audiences, The Second Phase of the STEP-City Study has been written by Antine Zijlstra

Below larger versions of the figure in Chapter 8 can in the book can be found:

Figure 8.5 Basic means-end chain model pdf


Figure 8.6 Impression: result of the analysis of the value hierarchy of The Miser (Toneelgroep Amsterdam), Stadsschouwburg Groningen (7 December 2011). pdf


Figure 8.7 Adapted means-end chain model for theatre attendance (boxes connected with arrows on the left) and phases of the theatrical event and its connection to daily lives of participants (boxes on the right) (Zijlstra 2020) (in color) pdf



Figure 8.8 The mediating role of the theatrical experience pdf



Figure 8.9 An abbreviated and simplified value hierarchy of the positive valuation pattern of the performance The Miser. pdf



Figure 8.10 An abbreviated and simplified value hierarchy of the negative valuation pattern of the performance The Miser pdf



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