EVALUATION FINDINGS: COMMUNITY & PROGRAMS
To what extent and in what ways did RAC community programs affect perceptions of art, the AAM, and the region among participants? The COVID-19 pandemic required the CRE team to adjust the study design and data collection protocols for research and evaluation. In particular, the CRE team added a community questionnaire to measure perceptions of art and the AAM in the community while programming was put on hold due to the pandemic. This community questionnaire method allowed the CRE team to “take the temperature” of potential stakeholders in the RAC network communities throughout the year and gauge the possible changes occurring in their areas as the COVID-19 pandemic progressed during the project. The CRE team distributed the community questionnaire to email lists provided by RAC member institutions three times during the project: Summer 2020, Autumn 2020, and Spring 2021. Email lists, while not representative of the general public in the geographic areas surrounding the RAC network institutions, do include self-selected stakeholders likely to be especially attuned to changes in the arts in their areas. Programming at RAC organizations started to slowly come back in Autumn 2021, including programming specifically organized as part of the RAC project. Although it was delayed, this gave the CRE team some opportunity to evaluate perceptions among community program participants. The program questionnaire, given to participants in two RAC-sponsored programs in Autumn 2021, captured the perceptions of arts in a given community, as well as attitudes related to the arts as a result of their participation in the program. Items on the questionnaire related to perceptions of the arts in communities matched the items included in the community questionnaire. We used these matched items to test whether each group differed significantly from the other.
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