ABSTRACT
This chapter provides detailed information on how we conducted the Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts research project. We justify the use of talk-based methods and show how we tried to recruit a diverse range of participants for in-depth interviews about their arts engagement. We reflect on the challenges of analysing such a large dataset: interviews with 187 people, resulting in over 1.5 million words of transcription. We introduce the arts organisations who were our partners in the study, across four UK cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and London. We outline our methodological decisions from the pilot phase to the national online survey, our approaches to analysis and the implications of our research experiences for the field of audience studies.
