Christine Larouche

Christine Larouche is a passionate evaluation and audience insights consultant with a keen interest in emerging research technologies and in inclusive research practices that help enhance museums’ relevance to 21st-century audiences and to the community at large. Ms. Larouche has conducted evaluation and audience research work for museums and interpretive centers devoted to culture, science, nature, the environment, social justice, art and history across the United States. Clients have included the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, Poplar Forest (Thomas Jefferson’s second home in Virginia), the Greater Newark Conservancy, the Nurture Nature Center in Pennsylvania, Boston’s Freedom Trail, Olana (the home of artist Frederic Church), the African American Museum Association, and three Smithsonian Museums: the National Museum of African American History Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History.

She has collaborated with cross-functional teams that included a diversity of stakeholders from museum directors, curators, museum educators and exhibit developers to community activists, boards of directors, marketing professionals, social media managers, interpretive planning consultants, museum volunteers and visitor services staff. She believes strongly that research is only as good as its capacity to inform practice and that best practices only happen when there is buy-in across the organization and with key stakeholders about the evaluation process and its implications. With this in mind, she is constantly on the look-out for techniques and approaches that enhance the evaluator’s ability to bring various stakeholders to a common understanding of research questions, research findings and research implications.

Her earlier positions as Director of Interactive Media and as Senior Director of Education for an educational television station in Toronto inform her ability to design research strategies that optimize the development and fine-tuning of interactive exhibits and that help generate meaningful learning in visitors.

Ms. Larouche holds an MA in Education, with a specialization in Measurement and Evaluation from the University of Toronto (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), an Honours BA in Psychology from York University in Toronto, and a college diploma in French literature from the CÉGEP de Jonquière (a college in Québec, Canada). She conducted much of her Museum Evaluation and Audience Research work on behalf of People, Places & Design Research, the most senior firm dedicated to museum evaluation and audience research in the country. She works equally well in English and French and is conversational in Spanish. In addition to her work in Museum Evaluation and Audience Insights, she offers services in Public Opinion and Marketing Research.