Telephone or Face-to-face Interviews

The last step was to interview five selected art-related museum studies institutions from the participants. The questions were structured with an open-ended nature. The interview questions included difficulties, achievements, and concerns for future art-related museum training. Information on conditions, strategies, and prospects for future art museum professionals were gathered as well. Based on each institution's unique experiences, I followed Seidman's (1998) Reflecting on the meaning questioning skills to gather participants' perceptions on the content of museum studies programs. This component served as a follow-up to document-based research and survey research to fill possible gaps in the research design.

Museums' missions are aimed at serving the public at large. The mission of a museum studies program is to cultivate museum professionals. The ultimate goal of museums and museum studies should be to provide sound management, a safe environment for collections, and a multitude of meaningful events to the general public (Woodhead & Stansfield, 1989). The goal of museum studies programs is to help museums achieve their goals through educating properly trained museum professionals. In that context, I attempted to answer the question, "Do art-related museum studies programs in the United States adequately serve the staffing needs of art museums as perceived by current museum professionals?"

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