Unobtrusive Observational Measures as a
Qualitative Extension of
Visitor Surveys at Festivals and Events:
Mass Observation Revisited
A. V.
SEATON
This article explores methodological issues in monitoring one-time, short-run, festival
performances and events with fast exit rates (e.g., concerts and theatrical performances).
Through critical case analysis the article suggests the limitations ofquestionnaire surveys
and the value ofaugmenting them with unobtrusive, direct observational measures derived
from those first used in U.K. leisure/tourism research by Mass Observation in the 1930s
and 1940s and since commended to, but rarely adopted by, tourism researchers.
The value of public sector-led festivals and events as
tourism development opportunities is now well recognized
and reported (Getz 1991; Mayfield and Crompton 1995b),
although little has been published on the methodological
problems associated with their evaluation. The importance
of triangulation studies through multiple measures has been
commended (Ralston and Stewart 1990) but rarely adopted.
Mayfield and Crompton (1995a)have reported on the claimed
use of consumer research by festival organizers in the United
States, but no comparative work exists indicating the specific
techniques most commonly employed or why they were used.
Published work on individual festivals suggests that the
standard methodology is still the multiple-choice, questionnaire survey (e.g., Scottish Tourist Board and Highlands and
Islands Development Board 1990; Tourism South Australia
1991; Scotinform Ltd. 1992; Richards 1992; Denton and
Furse 1993; Crompton and Love 1995). The case study
described in this article highlights problems with the questionnaire survey as a sole methodological instrument for
festival/event evaluation and suggests how observational
methods can provide useful augmentation.
THE EASTWOOD PROGRAMS
Between April 1 and 8, 1995, two regional public sector
organizations in Scotland, Renfrewshire Enterprise and
Eastwood District Council, jointly staged an eight-day Easter
Arts Fest in Eastwood, a local authority area southwest of
Glasgow. The festival program consisted of more than 40
events, including children's events, theatrical performances,
A. V. Seaton is the Director of the Scottish Tourism
Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland.
jazz and classical music concerts, outdoor happenings, and
art exhibitions.
An evaluation program was contracted to the Scottish
Tourism Research Unit, a research group based at the University of Strathclyde, with the following charge:
(1) To provide information on visitors in terms of origin,
motivation, spending, levels of awareness, and
satisfaction,
(2) To provide data on the reception of the overall festival, and
(3) To provide data on the main individual events and a
representative range of the smaller ones.
After a literature search of recent academic festival
evaluation studies and a best-practice guide to survey methodology by a national tourist office (Scottish Tourist Board
1993), a 23-item, multiple-choice questionnaire survey was
chosen as the research instrument. It included questions on
visitor profiles (sociodemographics, party size and composition, traveling distance), motivations, activities, transport
and accommodation, source of information about event,
spending, and satisfaction. The questionnaire was administered through personal interviews by trained interviewers. A
random sample of 1,200 was chosen for the eight-day event,
a number deemed suitable to provide feedback on the major
events and a representative range of the smaller ones (the
achieved sample was 1,236). Over the eight days, 23 events
were monitored. Because of the complexity of the program,
which included events running concurrently in different locations within the Eastwood area, it was decided to deploy the
field interviewers flexibly under the direct supervision of
research managers in the field. The interview team for each
afternoon or evening session normally comprised six or seven
interviewers. Provision was made for switching interviewers
from one event to another at short notice as occasion
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demanded (i.e., if one event was poorly attended, interviewers
were deployed elsewhere). The research managers were continuously present throughout the eight days of the field program, a level of direct, managerial participation unusual in
survey administration and one that had an important bearing
on the way the program was modified in "midstream."
THE PROBLEMS WITH THE SURVEY
By the second day of the interviewing it became clear that
the survey methodology had logistical limitations that were
substantive.
(1) At some events it was difficult to get adequate responses
to the satisfaction questions in the survey.
For closed-door, one-time performances (e.g., concerts
and theatrical performances) and other events with a rapid
exit rate, it was often difficult or impossible to interview a
large enough sample of the audience at the end of the event
to determine satisfaction levels. Typically, people hurried
away or were reluctant to be detained (evidenced by high
refusal rates or galloping "yes/no" answers rattled out without reflection to get the interview over quickly). Much of the
interviewing had to be undertaken before or during the event
to achieve a reasonable sample. Forty-three percent of the
interviews were administered before events, and for one performance the pre-event sample was 100%.
(2) Much useful information on the organization, scheduling, and audience responses to the individual events could
not be captured within the agreed survey framework. The
problems were fourfold.
a) The relevent dimensions of evaluation for individual
events had not been fully anticipated and probably
could never have been. A survey can only monitor
evaluative dimensions previously identified for inclusion in a questionnaire. This is relatively simple in
monitoring a single attraction with a permanent, physicallocation (a museum, park, destination, etc.) where
relevent dimensions of evaluation can be determined
from prior physical inspection, precedent (e.g., previous visitor studies), or generated through presurvey,
pilot work with target visitors (e.g., using Kelly's repertory grid to generate salient categories of evaluation).
Festivals differ qualitatively from fixed site attraction
tourism in that
• they comprise many, multisite, one-time events where
it is impossible to test a questionnaire "in situ" ahead
of the event. There is only one opportunity to get
it right.
• each event has its own content, setting, patronage,
and timing, making it difficult to anticipate all the
critical dimensions of evaluation beforehand. Event
evaluations are affected by factors specific to the
enactment of the event/performance itself (the actors,
the musicians, the program, etc.) and contextual and
logistic factors (acoustics, geography, weather, timing, audience behavior, general atmosphere), many
of which only emerge on the day. For example, one
of the main musical events at Eastwood, an open-air
jazz concert, was adversely affected by rain and by
the limited supply of seats, and another classical concert performance was abbreviated because of cold
weather, none of which had been anticipated.
26
b) Even if all the relevant dimensions of evaluation had
been anticipated, it would have been impractical to
explore them all without devising an impossibly complex general questionnaire or customizing a questionnaire for each event. It was found, for example, that
the factors contributing to the success of musical events
were different from those affecting children's events.
Different factors affected outside events than those
staged indoors. One solution might have been to produce a questionnaire for each event, but this would have
been time-consuming and would have made it difficult to aggregate the data to provide an overview of
the whole festival.
c) Some of the relevant dimensions of evaluation for
specific events that emerged during the fieldwork were
affected by political issues that would probably have
been excluded from survey protocols by the research
sponsors. At some events special provision had been
made for VIPs that involved privileged seating, hospitality, and access. This produced some resentment
among the rank and file audience. It is unlikely that,
even if this issue had been foreseen, it would have been
an accepted agenda issue for the questionnaire survey.
Two weeks before the festival the Conservative
Council for Eastwood, one of the organizers, was voted
out of office in local elections. Conversation between
research observers and festival staff suggested that this
affected the morale of the organizers and reduced
executive involvement and enthusiasm in the time
preceding the festival. Local politics are often involved
in festival organization but can rarely be recognized
in the design of evaluation surveys.
d) Members ofthe survey team were struck by the amount
of relevant information on the organizational and
experiential aspects ofindividual events that eluded the
survey structure because it came in the form of nonverbal responses and nonprompted verbal commentary
from the audience or direct observation of events by
the research team. This can be illustrated by one
instance, the "Antiques Road Show," an indoor event
based on a popular TV program in which members
of the audience bring along personal possessions and
collectibles to be valued by a panel of experts from
an auction house. Despite attracting an audience of
more than 400, it was quickly apparent that it was
doomed to failure because of logistical factors that only
emerged on the day: the length of time people had to
wait for evaluations of their collectibles; the fact
that the valuations were made privately to each individual at a kiosk rather than, as in the TV version,
delivered on camera to the whole audience; and the
unanticipated difficulties of transferring a successful
TV format, intrinsically dependent on technical
processing for its impact (e.g., close-up photography,
special lighting, editing, etc.), to live entertainment.
Negative audience comments and instances of people
walking out before getting their valuations reinforced
these impressions.
THE OBSERVATIONAL PROGRAM
Some of these methodological limitations were recog-
nized by the research team by the second day, and they decided
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to try to compensate for them by a "midstream" remedial
augmentation to the survey using qualitative observation.
Since no case applications of observational measures were
known to the researchers in recent literature on festival monitoring, an improvised program of "unobtrusive measures"
(Webb et al. 1966) was developed, derived from the researchers' awareness of techniques used and reported by the oldest
market research movement in Britain, Mass Observation.
Mass Observation was set up by Charles Madge and Tom
Harrison in 1937 to explore aspects of everyday behavior in
Britain. Its agenda was to map the activities and experiences
of ordinary people - the movement described its work as
"the anthropology of everyday life." A major focus of its research was popular culture and leisure behavior (Calder and
Sheridan 1984). The group was one of the first in the world
to conduct systematic studies into mass leisure activities,
including holidays, drinking in public houses (Mass Observation 1943), dance crazes, and visiting the cinema (Richards
and Sheridan 1987). Its most celebrated study was an observational survey of an unique, one-time national festival,
Coronation Day, May 12, 1937 (Jennings and Madge 1937).
Mass Observation used a team of full-time investigators
and a nationwide panel of voluntary informants. The organization employed multimethodological techniques (secondary
data searches, content analysis, questionnaire surveys), but
its most famous innovation was the adaptation of a range of
unobtrusive, participant observation measures, previously
used mainly by anthropologists in the study of cultures
abroad, to study U.K. leisure behavior. These included the
use of diaries kept by participants and observations taken by
semiparticipant and nonparticipant observers briefed to
mingle, eavesdrop, watch, and record the phenomena under
study. In his recent book, Researching Tourist Satisfaction,
Ryan (1995), referencing Gold (1969), identified four roles
in participant observation research: participant, participant
observer, observer participant, and observer. Mass Observation at various times used researchers in all four roles. No
other organization in the leisure field has made use of such
an extensive range of observational techniques. Though it can
be criticized for its weak theoretical basis and its sometimes
eccentric eclecticism, Mass Observation's work still represents a rich reservoir of data on British popular culture and
a stimulus to current workers in leisure research. Mass Observation's procedures provided a rich qualitative insight into
the texture of U.K. leisure experiences and were used later
during World War IT, under government sponsorship, to
monitor morale and public opinion in wartime Britain. The
observers in this study were briefed not only to monitor
preselected issues but to adapt quickly to new ones identified in the observational process.
Mass Observation provided a stimulus in Eastwood to
mount an observational program that involved the following:
(1) Three observers separate from the main survey field force
were introduced at events with instructions to move about,
observe the audience, and record information that, in their
view, indicated an event's success (or failure) and the reasons for it. They were asked to keep notes on the organization and scheduling of each event, make estimates of
audience numbers, record descriptions of audiences based
on nonverbal indicators of individual and collective
audience reactions to each event, and engage in casual
conversation and listen to and record spontaneous
audience comments.
(2) The main survey field force was rebriefed to keep supplementary, open-ended notes on its interviews in addition to recording answers to the structured questions.
Interviewers were directed to note spontaneous verbal
comments made by respondents during interviews and to
record their own impressions of audience behavior.
(3) Observers and interviewers attended a collective debriefing at the end of each fieldwork session at which all
comments were compared and discussed, and, once a
consensus on them had been reached, qualitative notes
on each event were recorded and later compared with
findings of the main survey interviews.
RESULTS
The observational program was found to augment the main
survey by providing reliability cross-checks, supplementary
data, and explanatory data. The differences between the utility
of surveys and observational methods in festivals/event evaluation, based on the results obtained from these methods, are
summarized in Exhibit 1.
Reliability Cross-Checks that Triangulated
Responses in the Main Survey
The qualitative observational program triangulated some
of the data in the main questionnaire survey by offering corroborating evidence on the following items:
Audience Profiles. Observational records supported some
of the sociodemographic data in the main survey. The
audience for an evening jazz concert, which emerged in
the questionnaire survey as an upmarket one, was rated to
be such through observers' inspection of the number of highperformance cars in the parking facility (Jaguars, Audis,
BMWs) and by the formal clothing of the audience (suits and
evening dress in some instances). Observational assessments
of the gender and age of audiences matched the survey results,
confirming that many events were dominated by a high
proportion of middle-aged people and attracted few in the
15- to 24-year-old age group.
Satisfaction. Observational judgments based on nonverbal
indicators and spontaneous verbal responses matched satisfaction responses in the main survey. The nonverbal responses
included facial expressions and body position during performances, looks of boredom or interest, frequent fidgeting,
early departure, volume and length of applause, and stamping or clapping for encores. The verbal responses included
overheard audience comments of approval or complaint made
during or at the end of an event and unprompted comments
made to researchers. An evening ceilidh (Scottish dance event)
was judged successful by the numbers of people dancing and
evidently enjoying the occasion, the volume of noise, and the
high proportion of people who stayed until the event finished.
A classical concert was rated successful from the voiced
appreciation overheard as the audience left. Other events were
judged less successful by looks of discontent, early exits, and
complaints about cost, delays, and organization.
Catering/Hospitality Provision Indicators. Observations
of the catering facilities were compared with responses to the
catering question in the main questionnaire. At an open-air
jazz concert that was attended by 400 people, the hospitality
tent seldom consisted of more than a handful of drinkers, and
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the hamburger stand served fewer than a dozen people in the
first hour. At the final event, a bonfire and fireworks display,
people were seen walking away from the contract catering
van without buying anything or were heard complaining of
its limited choices. The survey subsequently indicated a significant level of dissatisfaction with the catering at this event.
Supplementary Data to the Main Survey
The qualitative program generated additional data to that
obtained by the structured questionnaire.
Audience Data. One of the most valuable outputs of the
observational measures was data that augmented the sociodemographic responses generated by the main survey. The
most important finding, because it was entirely unexpected,
was the identification of the high number of stakeholders
attending some events. There were two kinds of stakeholders.
• Those watching friends and relatives (WFRs). A visitor category that we believe has not been identified or named
in festivalresearch is WFRs, those people who attend an event
to watch friends and relatives. The category first came to light
through an exchange between an observer and a member of
the audience at an open-air jazz concert featuring a wellknown local singer, Carol Kidd. The audience member, a
jazz musician, commented that "about 20% of the audience"
was made up of professional jazz musicians and friends of
the singer. Once the research team had been sensitized to this
group, it was observed elsewhere, for example, at events
where parents came to watch children performing and at
theatrical events attended by friends and relatives of the cast.
WFRs may be highly significant at regional festivals, where
it may be as important for festival organizers to schedule
events that include a high number of local performers to attract
a strong core audience of friends and relatives as it is to get
bigger "name" performers from outside the area.
• VIP groups. A second stakeholder effect observed was
recognition of the number of VIPs present at the main events.
These included friends and relatives of sponsoring groups
and representatives from local political and administrative
organizations. The sponsors of the research had asked for
VIPs to be excluded from the main survey, so their presence
would have gone unnoticed if it had been the sole basis of
event monitoring. They were readily observed by the privileged hospitality they received (receptions in areas adjoining the main events), special seating, and a late arrival facility.
Their number and privileged treatment was resented by members of the main audiences, an important consideration for
any rerun of the festival.
In addition to identifying the stakeholder groups, observational counts also corrected audience estimates derived
from tickets sold before performances. These corrected counts
showed that, in some cases, attendance was 20% lower than
ticket sales (and local press reports) suggested.
Event Organization, Scheduling, and Performance. The
main survey included responses to some aspects of the
festival's organization and scheduling (car parking facilities,
toilet facilities, catering), but the observational measures
revealed others: the ground covering used to protect grassy
areas at outdoor concerts was not burn proof, and discarded
cigarettes easily burned holes into it; the acoustics were poor
at some concerts; the knowledge of individual events (their
timing, duration, and content) varied among the organizational staff who were delegated with responsibility for each
event, which frustrated members of the public seeking information; food and beverage options at some events were
limited and, at one afternoon and evening event, virtually
nonexistent; visitors felt that some outdoor events should have
been scheduled for a summer rather than a spring festival;
and security arrangements were poor - in one instance
teenagers set fire to toilet facilities in a park.
EXHIBIT 1
THE COMPARATIVE UTILITY OF QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEYS AND UNOBTRUSIVE OBSERVATIONAL MEASURES
FOR FESTIVAL/EVENT EVAWATION BY SELECTED EVAWATIVE DIMENSIONS
Evaluative
Dimensions
Questionnaire Survey Utility
Unobtrusive Observation Utility
Audience profiles
Excellent. Provided data on sociodemographics:
place of residence, age, gender, occupational status
and social grading; traveling distance, traveling time,
and party size and composition.
Modest but useful. Provided some triangulated data
on social grading, age, and gender to the main survey;
provided additional descriptors of audience (WFRs and
stakeholders); facilitated accurate attendance counts.
Motivations
Modest because limited to a few multiple-choice
questions ("What is the main purpose of your visit
to 'this area'?"and "What in particular attracted you
to come to this event?").
Modest but useful. Extended insight into motivations
excluded from questionnaire (e.g., motive of attendance at some events was parents wanting to
occupy children who were on school vacation).
Satisfactions
Poor/modest because of difficulty/impossibility of
achieving responses during or at the end of many
performances.
Good. Allowed judgments of reactions/satisfactions
during all performances and some at end; provided
triangulated data on some satisfaction responses to
survey schedule.
Explanations of behavior
Poor because it is limited to inferences drawn from
behavioral responses inventoried in survey multiplechoice questions.
Modest but useful. Suggested reasons for liking or
disliking some events excluded from the questionnaire survey.
Organization of event
and scheduling issues
Modest because it is limited to a few questions
on preselected aspects (catering, parking facilities,
etc.).
Very good because it facilitated judgments on
unanticipated aspects; provided triangulated data on
some responses to the survey schedule (e.g., on
catering).
Performer reactions
None because no performer measures were
included in survey (though this could have been
monitored by a separate survey).
Modest but useful in indicating some performer
satisfactions and intentions to perform again at the
festival.
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Performer Feedback. The main survey did not monitor
festival performer satisfaction, a factor that can be important where festival planners may want to re-engage performers
for future events. Conversation with performers revealed that
in two cases they did not wish to repeat their participation
at the festival. Musicians at an open-air music recital commented that bad weather and poor acoustics had ruined their
performance and necessitated its abrupt finish and that, as
a result, they would not perform in future festivals. At the
"Antiques Road Show," the director of Christies, the auction
house staging the event, said he did not wish to run the event
again and had only agreed to do so at Eastwood with some
misgivings. Other performers expressed satisfaction and willingness to perform at future festivals.
Explanatory Data on the Visitor
Satisfaction Responses
The observational measures provided valuable insights
into how the festival was received and why some elements
worked better than others.
The quantitative survey elicited a high level of overall satisfaction with the festival (99% of the 1,236 people interviewed
provided affirmative answers to the question, "Would you
like this kind of festival to be repeated in future years?").
The observational measures suggested reasons for the satisfaction. A comment volunteered by several respondents was
the value of the festival's daily children's events as a means
by which parents could occupy their children during school
holidays. Other freely elicited comments spoke of the festival being "good for the area." Both comments suggested
the community value of regional festivals.
Observation provided explanatory insights into components of the festival that would have been impossible to
achieve by survey methods. The closing, free-admission
event, "The Rite of Spring," an afternoon and evening event
climaxing with a bonfire and fireworks, was rated low by
survey respondents (40% said it was "a bit disappointing/very
disappointing/didn't know what to expect"). Observation
showed that the 2,000 people who had gathered at 7:00 p.m.
had to wait until 9:00 p.m. for the bonfire, by which time
many adults with children had drifted away and others
expressed frustration and impatience. Some of the departing
parents complained that their children were starting a new
school term the next day and could not be kept up any longer.
The event also produced adverse ratings on catering provision
(46% of respondents said the catering was only "average/poor
or very poor"). Observation revealed that the catering contractors had run out of hot drinks and most food items within
an hour of the event's beginning.
The success of a sell-out, classical concert staged in a local
church - for which the survey had revealed "word of mouth"
as a particularly high information source - was traced,
through verbal comment, to a specific reference group effect.
The concert's unique promotion was through pulpit announcements by the minister to his congregation. Church members
and their friends were among those that attended the concert.
Observation helped to clarify conflicting responses in the
survey. The fact that an evening jazz concert was rated as
"expensive" by some but "good value" by others was partly
explained by finding, through overheard comments and direct
questioning, that the people who thought it was too expensive were judging it in isolation as a local event, while others
were comparing it with large concerts elsewhere (one respon-
dent commented that "it is dirt cheap compared to what you'd
have to pay for a concert like this in London").
LIMITATIONS OF STUDY AND FURTHER WORK
The observational measures reported in this article fell
short of methodological perfection, because they were improvised at short notice.
Several improvements can be identified for the future.
Reliability Checks
A critical factor in observational research is ensuring that
the observers' perceptions are reliable, an issue that can only
be determined by monitoring for consistency of records kept
by several observers at the same event. This problem was
partly addressed in the collective debriefings at which observations kept by both the observer and survey teams were compared and discussed, after which consensual comments were
recorded. A planned improvement for the future is the allocation of two or more observers to each event who are briefed
to independently record observations across a number of
agreed dimensions. A comparison of their observations will
be conducted.
More Systematic Reporting Categories
The observational brief was open-ended. It is our intention
in future programs to develop a more complete guideline,
reporting categories for all observers rather than leaving much
to the discretion of each. In doing so we shall be mindful
of the need to retain the flexibility to "depart from the
observational script" to capitalize on a key strength of observational measures - the capture of data on issues that have
not been anticipated.
The Use of Technological Aids in
Observational Reporting
A third area of development is the possibility of improving
the reliability of observations through mechanical recording.
A number of findings from the Eastwood program could have
been captured by hidden microphone, photographic film, or
video (e.g., the VIP positions and the absence of catering
facilities). Since observers at festivals can easily pass as
members of the participating audience, as Mass Observation
researchers did in their survey of holiday behavior at
Blackpool (Calder and Sheridan 1984), the carrying of
cameras and videos need not interfere with unobtrusive
observation. However, we exclude the option of overt video
interviews with members of the audience since such "vox
pop" techniques may precipitate response sets (e.g., constrained, exaggerated, or rehearsed responses) that distort
patterns of natural behavior.
The WFR Factor
The Eastwood observations suggested one major innovation to future festival surveys - the introduction of a
category of question designed to provide data on WFR
visitors. The question currently agreed to for pilot testing for
possible incorporation into future festival surveys is "Are you
here today to watch a friend, relative, or associate performing or taking part in the event?"
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CONCWSIONS
The survey methodology will always be a variable in
festival research simply because of the intractable problem
that the standard pilot testing procedures in situ, necessary
for effective questionnaire development, are impossible for
one-time events with no permanent location.
It is unlikely that the specific problems with the Eastwood
festival survey (the difficulties of anticipating and accommodating all the key dimensions of event evaluation; the logistical difficulties of obtaining a sufficient quantity/quality of
valid satisfaction responses; the motivational/explanatory data
that eluded the survey) are unique. A seminal appraisal of
tourism research methodologies, written over 20 years ago,
anticipated many of the special problems of events surveys,
noting that "the very nature of the event demands that interviews be carried out in less than ideal conditions," and advocated "greater effort to develop special-events measuring
instruments" (Ritchie 1975, pp. 4, 6).
The observational methods described here went some way
to addressing the limitations of the survey as the single measuring instrument in festival evaluation. They were not new.
Mass Observation had employed them in leisure research 60
years ago. Webb and his associates, in a classic text that
introduced the term "unobtrusive measures" into social
science research, anatomized the advantages of nonreactive,
observational methodologies 30 years later (Webb et al, 1966).
Unobtrusive observation has been endorsed in cross-cultural
research in psychology (Boechner 1980). Tourism research
texts have included accounts (Ritchie and Goeldner 1987;Veal
1992), and Ryan has recently (1995) appraised the uses of
participant observation and "conversation as a source of data."
Yet observational measures still have negligible status in
modern tourism research. Tourism has favored the questionnaire survey as a known quantity, readily sold to industry
and accepted for academic publication, in the same way that
public opinion agencies have stayed with the opinion poll.
A quantitative empiricist tradition has been routinized into
tourism research that rarely captures the complexities of festival and, indeed, other kinds of tourism experience. Festivals
are colorful, heterogeneous occasions, staged to disrupt the
mundane drift of regional life. Their diverse audience effects
can never be fully caught by the diligent analysis, however
statistically rigorous, of responses to a limited number of
questions, preselected long before the event, by those who
have little way of knowing the half of what is going to happen before it does.
This article provides a demonstration of the practical value
of humanistic observation and indicates why the researchers
plan to augment future festival and event evaluations with
unobtrusive observational programs more likely than surveys
30
alone - to capture the variety and quality of leisure experience, the informing spirit of Mass Observation 60 years ago.
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