If you are like me, you have been excited by the increased quantity and quality of research being made available about arts and culture issues and practices!
Even if you aren’t as excited as I am, you may be finding some research reports to be helpful and interesting to your daily operations. The format and presentation of information over the last five years or so has really made dense concepts easier to understand.
I encourage you all to head over to a post published today on Arts Hacker where I talk about the potential to misread and misinterpret research findings.
Earlier this month Colleen Dilenschneider wrote about some really egregious misreadings of research findings by cultural executives. While these anecdotes were entertaining, I thought maybe she was exaggerating the problem a little bit.
However, when I was reading Board Source’s Leading With Intent study in preparation for writing a blog post earlier this month, they had a section which specifically cautioned about misreading their graphics and emphasized the need to carefully read captions explaining what was being depicted.
The Arts Hacker post deals with all of this in greater detail and illustrations. Whether you think you are apt to following into the trap of misinterpreting data or not, it is worth the quick read to help be more mindful of this tendency.