Museum Impact and Community Wellbeing: Evaluating the evidence

The UKRI-funded project Museums, Crisis and Covid-19 (MCC19) established the importance of museums during the pandemic. Museums offered their resources and spaces, as places for people to come together safely and rebuild their networks. The argument that ‘Museums Change Lives’ (Museums Association) is well made and widely accepted; however, in a time of financial pressure, museums need more effective and persuasive evidence of their impacts.

The MCC19 project recommended that the museum sector is supported to find new methods to measure museum impacts, that reflect the multiple ways people find value in museums. We need to support the sector to foster new measures that acknowledge the qualities of wellbeing work. With more robust evidence, museums should be able to work more effectively and demonstrate that to others.

Research Aim

Critically evaluate the quality of existing evidence for museum impacts and making recommendations for more robust evidence.

Research Objectives

1.    To explore case made for ‘museums change lives’ drawing out the themes relevant to community wellbeing in a Northern Ireland setting;

2.    To explore national and international methodologies for gathering impact evidence in the cultural sectors

3.    To understand and evaluate the current methods used for gathering evidence of impact amongst Northern Ireland’s museums;

4.    To make recommendations for how the Northern Ireland museum sector might gather more robust data around museum impacts.

Note: we welcome proposals for projects that engage with the research objectives above or related thematic areas and issues around museum impacts and their underpinning practices. 

With guidance and support from supervisors, the candidate will engage with the local and national museum sector as well as community organisations in Northern Ireland. In their second year, the Researcher will organise a public seminar on gathering evidence of museum impacts. We plan for this project to be interdisciplinary and to engage with Ulster University colleagues working in related fields.