Questionnaire and interview question design

The questionnaire (see Annexes 1) included two parts. In the first part of the questionnaire, visitors were asked to answer some basic questions related to their demographic status. The design of these questions aimed to collect data that would be helpful in understanding the characteristics of the identified visitor groups (if applicable). The second section of the questionnaire explored the visitors’ tastes toward the listed music and literature genres and their knowledge of contemporary art theories and art history. Specifically, the primary aim of this phase was to identify cultura l consumption patterns on the basis of ten types of music genres with fifty geographic a l

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and cultural featured music options, ten types of books with fifty geographical and cultural featured literary options, eight conservative aesthetic claims and the names of eight selected artists. The analysis was conducted using SPSS version 22 statistica l software.

The design of the questions created for this research partly followed the general contours of Bourdieu’s approach, which was employed in his account The Love of Art (1977). It is important to keep in mind the possible influence of the omnivorousness, individualisation, the changing content of the aesthetics, the development of the cultura l field and other variables such as gender, age etc. that can have an impact on the formulation of an individual’s cultural practices and preferences. In this regard, the design of the questions does not exclusively focus on the ‘pedagogic expectations of the public’ (Ibid: 5) as Bourdieu did in The Love of Art. Instead, the analysis is also sensitive to various forces (e.g. the influences of gender, local cultural polices, and age) within the multidimensional cultural context.

An additional strategy for question design that this current research draws from is Bennett et al.’s inspired development of Bennett et al.’s questionnaire design approach in the UK (2009:36-39). They use a wide range of cultural genres among different fields of cultural consumption (e.g. music genres, TV programmes) as variables to explore the visitors’ patterned lifestyles and cultural preferences. However, due to the availability of unique features and purposes of this research, the design of the questions differs from their approaches in several significant aspects. First, following the approach of Bennett et al (2009), the analysis tests the influence of many demographic indicators such as class, gender, and age on constructing the variations of cultural tastes.

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However, the effort they made to involve an ethnic sample in the survey will not be considered in the questionnaire design and administration process of this study. The reason for this exclusion is that this current study primarily concentrates on the exploration of how an individual’s national identity rather than their ethnicity or race influences various cultural preferences. Rather than ignoring the matter of ethnicity, the possible findings regarding the relationship between national identity and specific cultural tendencies might provide another chance to figure out the puzzle that Bennett et al (2009) faced in measuring the significance of cross-boundary flow of cultures in shaping cultural consumption patterns. Third, due to the limitation of time available for conducting this research, this study will only examine the participants’ relations to the fields of literature, music and art rather than a whole set of cultural activities and tastes as in Bennett et al.’s study. Finally, the questions will include Chinese traditional music and literature genres in order to explore the locations of specific Chinese traditional art forms in the cultural field. The selection of music and literature genres was based on a series of discussions with a group of professionals who work as artists or in an occupation related to contemporary art and sociological studies. Specifically, the team includes four members: Zhang Liping, the head of fine art department in Xiamen University; Qin Jian, the leader of multimedia studies in the fine art department of Xiamen University; Zhang Kuo, contemporary artist who works in the Songzhuang Art Zone; and Cui Xiao, doctoral student in the sociology department of the Beijing Normal University. Discussions were arranged twice before the start of the fieldwork, and each conference call lasted for at least an hour. The purpose of the first meeting was to select music and literature that can be representative of highbrow, middlebrow, and popular cultural categories. The discussion was based on the analysis of the related materia ls and information that was collected from various types of resources such as magazines,

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social media, and newspapers. The second meeting refined and confirmed the content of the three patterns of tastes.

There were six questions designed for a 40-minute face-to-face structured intervie w, which aimed to establish a deep understanding of the cultural preferences, tastes, and habits of different types of visitors. Specifically, questions 1 and 2 were designed to explore visitors’ perception and reaction towards the specific exhibition and the contemporary art museums or galleries they attended. The detailed information from interviewees would give the researcher opportunities to trace and explore the multifaceted and complex forces and powers that motivate agents’ cultural practices and preferences, as well as identify any unnoticed variables beneath the yes/no answers on the questionnaire. Questions 3 and 4 mainly concentrate on interviewees’ specific artistic and cultural knowledge of contemporary art and other artistic genres such as music. Their purpose is to measure how well the interviewees understand the artistic genres they choose on the questionnaire. These questions can also separate an individual’s ‘cultural good will’ from their actual mastery of art forms. Question 5’s goal is to understand if the respondent understands the difference between domestic and western art forms. The final, sixth, question explores the possible homologous cultura l practices among different visitors.

Thus far, this section introduces whether and how the survey questions were selected and designed. As the last part of this chapter, the next section introduces the selected contemporary art museums, their location, the criteria for their selection, and fina lly describes them briefly. The beginning part of the following section introduces the study’s host city of Beijing, the home of six exhibiting venues, and describes why it

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was chosen as a research area. The second part details the criteria of case study venue selection, and the last part of this subchapter presents some basic information on the six participating art museums and galleries.