US Museum Professionals Survey on Ethics and Risk

23 museum professionals in the United States responded to a 38-question survey in July–August 2025. The dataset, prepared by Leander Gussmann for Harvard Dataverse, examines how working conditions shape ethical decision-making under political, financial, and managerial risk. It supports research on museum governance and institutional ethics.

Use Cases

• Analyze correlations between Likert-scale assessments of institutional pressures and categorical items on funding dependencies.
• Model relationships between open-text responses on community relations and categorical data on governance structures.
• Investigate patterns in open-text responses concerning professional autonomy and expectations of future constraints.
• Study the association between aggregated categorical items on perceived risk and Likert-scale assessments of organizational context.

Strengths

• Survey includes 38 questions combining categorical, Likert-scale, and open-text data.
• Data underwent manual anonymization and disclosure control procedures for public release.

Limitations

• Small sample size of 23 respondents limits statistical generalizability.
• Open-text responses have been manually anonymized, which may alter original nuance.
• Sparse categorical data has been aggregated, reducing granularity for analysis.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Qualitative survey of museum professionals.

Time Range

July–August 2025

Freshness

Data collected in July–August 2025 and last updated in April 2026.

Geography

United States