Australian Practicing Professional Artists (1988)

Other Studies of Multiple Artist Populations

Investigator: David Throsby

Population: Australian professional artists: writers, craftspeople, visual artists, composers, directors/designers, actors/puppeteers, dancers, choreographers, musicians, singers, and community artists.

Identification method: Artists drawn from extensive pooling of membership lists of associations and unions with information from grant applicant data base of the Australia Council.

Sampling procedure: Stratified sample frame based on the number of artists of different kinds appearing among persons identified as artists, with estimates for different fields checked against Australian Census occupational data.

N and Response rate: N=800. Response rate unavailable in works reviewed.

Publications: Throsby, D.

Throsby, D. and D. Mills. 1989. When Are You Going To Get A Real Job? An Economic Study of Australian Artists. Sydney: Australia Council.

Throsby, D. and Beverley Thompson. 1995. The Artist at Work: some further results from the 1988 survey of individual artists. Sydney: Australia Council.

Summary: Australian nationwide survey of practicing professional artists across disciplines, including information on the composition, education and training, working conditions and employment, financial circumstances, and career development of the artists’ population. (See also Australian Practicing Professional Artists [1983 and 1993]).