In Memoriam

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET On December 31, 2006, Seymour Martin Lipset, co-founder andeditor of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research,passed away at the age of 84 after a long and difficult illness.It is with deep sorrow and immense gratitude that we rememberour dearly departed friend, to whom     

In the periodicals

The spin‐off program, defined as “a new program derived from an existing one, usually through the appropriation of characters, “ has been used frequently as a primetime network television scheduling strategy since the 1960s. Implicit in the scheduling of spin‐off programs is the belief that they have a greater chance of success than non‐spin‐offs because the audience is already familiar with the characters and/or the situational aspects of the program. The purpose of this paper is to test this implied proposition through statistical analysis.     

In Byzantium1

During Spring 1997 we experimented with a research method combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to documenting visitor experiences in The Glory of Byzantium, a special exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to using standard demographic and behavior surveys, a small team of researchers and volunteers gathered information, compared experiences, and summarized their observations of people in the exhibition. Each team member conducted about a dozen structured conversations with visitors as they left the exhibition. Subsequently the team met as an informal focus group to describe their experiences. We found that many museum users arrived with relevant experiences and high expectations for this somewhat specialized exhibition; we also found users whose approach to the exhibition was less well‐informed, but whose enthusiasm and trust for the museum experience moved them to attend with satisfaction. We believe that such team approaches to research might well be used as a regular part of museum work as we search for answers to the many elusive questions about museum use.