Research and evaluation

Prototypes were trialled and developed with museums and galleries across the UK for their in-house and outreach activities with 250 participants over 12 months prior to production of the finished UCL Museum Wellbeing Measures Toolkit. The booklet version of the Toolkit contains additional information about the background to the study, the research and advice on how to analyse the data.

ToC is a map of the concrete changes you want to achieve and the actions that you will take to achieve them. It is an approach that helps you to break down broad long-term changes into smaller steps – creating a route-map for your work. ToC is a process as well as a product – a way for staff, volunteers, trustees and service users to reflect together on what you want to achieve and how you will get there. It can be used to plan, evaluate and communicate your work.

This is a comprehensive evaluation handbook by researcher Vassilka Shishkova (2017), commissioned by IETM international network for contemporary performing arts.  Although a longer handbook, it’s clearly written, and reflective about the difficulties of assessing (and importance of recording) the less obvious, intrinsic benefits of arts participation. It also highlights the differences between research and evaluation, the benefits for organisations of evaluating what they do, and the strengths and weaknesses of the whole spectrum of evaluation approaches.