Audiences

Audiences are the informal physics program attendees*. Our data are from program leaders and so our understanding of the audience is necessarily limited. Thus, the questions about the audience we answer are:

● How many people are participating?

● What is the geographical reach of the programs?

● What are the demographics of the audience?

Audience attendance for various programs is associated with the format of the events and activities and the frequency that those programs operate. In total, informal programs in our sample were reaching in over tens of thousands of people per year.

There is wide range of audience ages and demographics that the programs in our sample focus on recruiting, according to the lead facilitators, with K-8 and "general" audience being the most popular.

Some groups such as people living in rural areas or low-income households, were not largely recruited, even though our test state has large populations of those groups. We also find a number of lead facilitators recruited "all" groups - it is not clear what the results of this approach are.

*We note that the term “audience” is not ideal as it can imply a deficit approach to public engagement. However, we need a way to distinguish between the groups of a) physicists and physics students involved in the design and implementation of informal physics activities and b) the members of varied publics who engage in physics learning. It is also true from our research that the majority of programs have a delineation, where the audience is not involved in the design or implementation of the activities. Alternatives like “physicist participants” and “community participants”, while still not ideal (as physicists are part of communities too), may be better descriptors for a subset of programs.