Together or alone
“How often do you go to the theatre?” is a question almost nobody can answer accurately. People estimate, round up, and tend to name what they consider a reasonable amount rather than what they actually did. So the questionnaire does also ask what interests you and where you go — stage and music, museums and libraries, cinema, neighbourhood festivals, parks and sport, offers outside the city and online. But its centrepiece is something else: who with.
Who you usually go out with, how often your household does something outside the home together, who suggests it — and who you talk to about it afterwards. “And who usually suggests it?” is a question that appears in no visitor count and yet often decides more about an evening than the programme does.
Why this matters for the analysis
Because company can be changed and interest can hardly be changed at all. Who suggested it? Was there somebody to go with — and somebody to talk to about it afterwards? If leisure and culture create community anywhere, it is in these details, and something can be done about them, whereas nothing can be done about a preference.
Two further approaches sit alongside. One asks what holds people back: price, time of day, the journey, no one to go with — or the feeling of not being the intended audience. The other looks more closely at individual offers, standing in for various areas, and not with the question of whether you go, but: whom does this offer have in mind — and do you feel you are meant? No special knowledge is needed for that, only your impression.
The two questions about childhood are there for the same reason. Whether somebody goes today has much to do with whether it was customary earlier, and little to do with whether they could afford it. That is not a conjecture of this survey but one of the best-established findings in the sociology of culture — established, however, almost always on visitors. Here the population is asked, including those who do not come. That is precisely why this survey can test whether the finding holds for them as well — an audience study cannot, because it never sees them.
What does not follow from it
No educating the audience. The questionnaire contains no appeals, no event listings and no offers. It asks; it does not advertise. Not going is as valid an answer as going.
No interference with artistic freedom. The results describe what people do and what they are missing. They are not a prescription for what is staged. The freedom of the arts under Article 5(3) of the German Basic Law is untouched.
No league table of institutions. Where a particular institution is asked about, the point is perception and access, not a rating that could be added up into a table. Individual questionnaires are neither published nor passed on.
Further reading
What the questionnaire asks, in order, is set out in the summary What the questionnaire is about — eight stops on one page, without giving away the questions.
The other two parts are set out under Living in Düsseldorf and Your free time. Who is behind the survey is set out under Head of the study; who stands behind its design, under Voices on the panel.