How Much Do We Really Care About Our Cultural Heritage?

Ever wondered how much museums and monuments matter in your daily life? Researchers have developed CHARE, a scale that measures the "sense of care" for cultural heritage, focusing on young adults like you. After gathering 16 statements about how we behave with historic objects and sites, they tested the questionnaire on hundreds of students. The results show the model is reliable: answers align well with the "care theory," which explains the bond between citizens and culture. In practice, CHARE helps museums and schools understand if visitors feel engaged, want to protect a painting or statue, or simply move on. Although it’s just the first step, the tool can guide new educational activities and more attentive conservation policies. Imagine joining a school project where, thanks to CHARE, your group proposes an interactive exhibition to rediscover a historic site in your city. The outcome? More curiosity, more respect, and especially more young people feeling part of history.

The Rasch model, underpinning CHARE, is a psychometric analysis technique that converts ordinal item responses into a logit scale, ensuring that each item's difficulty and the respondent's ability are measurable on a single continuum. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional summed scores, as each item contributes proportionally to the final estimate. During development, researchers performed a systematic literature review on "caring behaviours" toward cultural assets, identifying recurring themes such as physical protection, emotional valuation, and active participation. Subsequently, focus groups with museum experts refined the 16 proposals, eliminating semantic ambiguities and ensuring coverage of all theoretical domains. Preliminary analysis revealed a reliability index (Person Separation Index) of 0.84, indicating good discrimination among individuals with varying care levels. Moreover, gender invariance testing confirmed that males and females interpret the items equivalently, making CHARE suitable for heterogeneous samples. For future validation, it is advisable to expand the sample across age groups and cultural contexts, as well as incorporate open-ended items to capture qualitative nuances of the sense of care.