Audiences and participation in museums. An interpretive model of post-visit suggestions

Audiences have become increasingly important as agents of cultural institutions, so, the listening of their discourses and evaluations on the institutions and the cultural products constitute relevant instruments for the management of the cultural mission and cultural policies.An important component of participation and evaluation, the collection of opinions and suggestions of visitors of the museal institutions reveals its potentiality because the actors' own discourseis the object of analysis. An analytical model which conveys meaning to the opinions and suggestions expressed by the audiences is an important step in this direction.This article focuses on the construction of an analytical model of the testimonies written after visiting museums and exhibitions. Its construction was carried out in the framework of the National Museums Visitor Study(EPMN), which included 14 museums (n= 6,656) (Neves & Mourão, 2016). In a second moment andframed by the empirical basis of the studies of these museums, it was applied in the analysis of its regular audiences (n= 912) in the Museums in the Future Project Group (Camacho, 2021). The matrix that is the main instrument of the model was again applied in the context of another empirical analysison the audiences of a temporary exhibition -Loulé: Territories, Memories and Identities (LTMI) -which took place at the Portuguese Museu Nacional de Arqueologia(Neves, Santos &Apolinário, 2020). The article begins with a theoretical framework about the audiences and their relevance to the museal institutions, and in this context, the importance of listen to their opinions and suggestions; it follows with the presentation of the methodology underlying the construction of the interpretive matrix and the explanation results of its application.We conclude that model'ssuccessive applications allow to sustain the adequacy and pertinence of the model and the conditions of its generalization to the analysis of opinions and suggestions, in different contexts, responding also toseveralchallenges concerning either the theoretical or the empirical dimensions.