Insights from Visitor Studies: A purpose-oriented model for museums
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In general, it is believed that the length of time a visitor spends in a museum can reflect the visitor’s preference to some extent. However, in the process of evaluating the exhibition, we discovered that some visitors who provided positive feedback did not pay sufficient attention during their visit. This article explores the relationship between visitor behavior and satisfaction, as well as its underlying causes. We conducted a mixed-methods case study of an ancient art gallery in the Shandong Museum in China. The research findings confirmed the presence of this phenomena. We discovered that the majority of visitors who provided positive feedback did not pay sufficient attention throughout their visit to the exhibition. To explore the causes of this phenomena, we further studied the disparities in visitor orientation and motivation among those who provided varying feedback. The results indicate that these disparities can be explained by John Falk’s identity-related motivation theory, according to which visitors’ behavior and levels of satisfaction reflect their unique identities. This result, on the one hand, broadens the applicability of identity motivation theory in satisfaction research, and on the other, it requires museums to pay more attention to the feedback’s underlying motives when performing visitor evaluation.
This study explores how the Aceh Tsunami Museum visitors’ motivation and experience affect their emotional reactions. The study expands current theorisations by examining the merits of emotional reaction in visitors’ behaviour models. A total of 384 visitors completed a self-administered survey via online forms. The results show that visitors’ emotional reaction is affected by motivational factors and their experience visiting the museum. This study fills in the gaps in the limited research on visitors’ motivations, experiences, and emotional reactions to the dark museum site. From a practical perspective, this one of the early studies proving that the Aceh Tsunami Museum is well perceived as a popular dark tourism site and can be promoted as a potential niche tourism product by the Aceh government.
In museum settings, caregivers support children's learning as they explore and interact with exhibits. Museums have developed exhibit design and facilitation strategies for promoting families' exploration and inquiry, but these strategies have rarely been contrasted. The goal of the current study was to investigate how prompts offered through staff facilitation vs. labels printed on exhibit components affected how family groups explored a circuit blocks exhibit, particularly whether children set and worked toward their own goals, and how caregivers were involved in children's play. We compared whether children, their caregivers, or both set goals as they played together, and the actions they each took to connect the circuits. We found little difference in how families set goals between the two conditions, but did find significant differences in caregivers' actions, with caregivers in the facilitation condition making fewer actions to connect circuits while using the exhibit, compared to caregivers in the exhibit labels condition. The findings suggest that facilitated and written prompts shape the quality of caregiver-child interactions in distinct ways.
Informal learning environments provide the opportunity to study guests’ experiences as they engage with exhibits specifically designed to invoke the emotional experience of awe. The current paper presents insight gained by using both traditional survey measures and innovative mobile eye-tracking technology to examine guests’ experiences of awe in a science museum. We present results for guests’ visual attention in two exhibit spaces, one chosen for its potential to evoke positive awe and one for negative awe, and examine associations between visual attention and survey responses with regard to different facets of awe. In this exploratory study, we find relationships between how guests attend to features within an exhibit space (e.g., signage) and their feelings of awe. We discuss implications of using both methods concurrently to shed new light on exhibit design, and more generally for working in transdisciplinary multimethod teams to move scientific knowledge and application forward.
Purpose
This paper aims at investigating how tourist experience elicits satisfaction and contributes to loyalty and willingness to pay more for a museum destination. The study also investigates the significant moderating role of visiting frequency on the relationship between satisfaction and willingness to pay more.
Design/methodology/approach
The research was conducted with 385 tourists who visited the National Museum in Ghana and answered questions relating to experience, satisfaction, loyalty, and willingness to pay more. Structural equation modelling was used to test the relationships and effects of the adapted constructs.
Findings
The results revealed the significant effects of tourist experience on satisfaction, as well as the significant effects of satisfaction on loyalty and willingness to pay more. In addition, a significant moderating effect of visiting frequency was reported on the relationship between satisfaction and tourist willingness to pay more.
Research limitations/implications
The research is destination-specific. The application of the findings to other museums would demand a bigger sample size for generalisation to be made.
Practical implications
Managers should develop strategies that promote museum tourist travelling experience, satisfaction, desire and choice, and thereby attract more tourists to museum sites.
Originality/value
The research contributes to the growing literature on museum tourist experience as an important variable in promoting tourist satisfaction, loyalty, and tourist willingness to pay more.
This paper examines the role of museum atmosphere in affecting brand trustworthiness, perceived quality, visitor satisfaction, and visitor behavioral intentions in a museum context in Italy. While broadly examined with reference to stores, atmosphere has been
rarely looked at in the museum context, particularly in Italy, the authors developed a research framework to investigate the relationships among museum atmosphere, brand trustworthiness, perceived quality, intention to revisit, and intention to recommend.
Using a survey as a research instrument, the study was conducted with 1,370 visitors of three Italian museums: Museo delle Culture (MUDEC), Museo del Novecento, and Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM). Results show that the museum atmosphere affects both perceptions of brand trustworthiness, and visitor behavioral intentions. The paper makes the case for using the development of the atmosphere as a strategy to include the visitor perspective in the museum value co-creation process. Theoretical and managerial implications are then outlined.
Effective interaction and inquiry are an essential source for children’s learning about science in an informal context. This study investigated the effect of parental pre-knowledge on parent–child interactions (manipulations, parent talk, and child talk) during an inquiry activity in NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. The sample included 105 parent–child dyads (mean children’s age = 10.0 years). Half of the couples were randomly assigned to the experimental group in which, without the child’s knowledge, the parent was shown the task’s solution prior to the inquiry activity. Results show that parental pre-knowledge affected the way parents interacted and inquired with their child. Compared to parents without pre-knowledge, parents with pre-knowledge inquired longer, posed more open-ended wh-questions and closed questions, and less often interpreted results. Children of parents with pre-knowledge more often described evidence and interpreted results, more often manipulated alone, and solved the task more accurately. These results indicate that parental pre-knowledge brings about parents’ scaffolding behavior. In addition, it was studied how individual differences of parents and children relate to parent–child interaction. Results show that children’s self-reported inquiry attitude was related to their conversation during inquiry, such that they asked fewer closed questions and more open-ended questions. Children’s gender affected the cooperation between parent and child, parents more often manipulated together with boys than with girls, and girls more often manipulated alone. Fathers with pre-knowledge, but not mothers, let their child manipulate more by oneself than fathers without pre-knowledge. This study shows that more knowledge about an exhibit improves a parent’s scaffolding behavior in a science museum. Results are discussed in the context of museum practice.
Experiences in community science institutions, such as aquaria, facilitate families’ participation in doing science and thinking scientifically and expose children of all ages to scientific processes. This pilot study explored whether and how adult science language was related to the science language that children used during informal science learning at an aquarium and tested a methodological approach to assess informal learning in biological science contexts. We observed and audio recorded children and their parents while exploring a live animal aquarium exhibit. Verbatim language transcripts were coded for science-related language. Results confirmed a methodological procedure that can be applied reliably to identify and categorize adult-child science talk that includes biological language. Findings also revealed that science process and biological-environmental science talk occurred most frequently in parent-child conversations; math and technology talk, while present, was much less prevalent. Results showed that parents who used more science language while talking in the aquarium had children who also used more science language (p = .009). Implications for designing ILEs to promote children’s STEM learning are discussed.
Recent research indicates that museums hold great potential for children’s engagement and learning. To date, most research has either focused on school-aged children or young children’s independent learning engagement and, as a result, little research has investigated how museum spaces may foster and enhance the interactive learning of families with prior-to-school-age children. The current study sought to investigate which features of museum spaces might promote rich learning conversations within such families when visiting three metropolitan museums. Applying an interpretivist lens on video data generated from child and parent videos, and analyzing postvisit interview data, this study found shared attention, questioning, technical vocabulary, and cognitive connections featured in the learning conversations in such spaces. Further, intricate detail, different perspectives, interactivity and multimodality were significant exhibit design features that appeared to promote such learning conversations. Implications for exhibit design are discussed in relation to the undergirding concept of sustained shared thinking. Free from: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/REKHYFZ6WH4TIZBR2VTT/full?target=10.1080/10645578.2019.1664849
Resumo: Este artículo reflexiona sobre la interactividad y la experiencia de los adolescentes en museos de ciencias, a través de un estudio exploratorio y cualitativo realizado en el Centro Interactivo de Ciencia y Tecnología Abremate (Argentina). El corpus recoge el registro audiovisual de las visitas realizadas por cinco grupos de estudiantes de 14 a 17 años de escuelas públicas del conurbano bonaerense. Los datos recolectados se codificaron con una herramienta orientada a comprender procesos de aprendizaje en museos de ciencias de América Latina. El análisis indica que la interactividad está presente, principalmente, en situaciones en las que los jóvenes interactúan en simultáneo con la exhibición y entre ellos, mientras conversan sobre la manipulación de los artefactos. También se observa que hay condiciones iniciales para promover el aprendizaje de actividades que enseñen a pensar y ejercitar emociones sobre la inteligibilidad del mundo.
In the context of museums, this article analyses to what extent visitor evaluation of the experience (attainment, emotion, and satisfaction) drives their short-term online behavior: consumption of further online content (intensification) and posting content in online sites (content generation). On the basis of the optimal stimulation level theory and on the balance theory, it proposes that the evaluation of the experience has an inverted U-effect on visit intensification intention while a U-effect on the intention to generate content after the visit. Findings indicate that satisfaction fosters the intention to intensify or consume further content, while the perception of having gained the maximum attainment and emotional value limits it. On the other hand, while satisfaction and the perception of a profitable visit motivate visitors to post online comments, poor experiences in museums have no impact on the generation of online content.
How do children begin to make the transition from seeing the natural world to scientifically observing the natural world? This study explored how differences in parent conversational strategies and disciplinary knowledge impact children's experience observing biological phenomena during shared informal learning. 79 parent-child pairs with children ages 6-10 participated in a controlled study in which half of the parents used their natural conversational style and the other half were trained to use four conversational strategies during family observations of pollination in a botanical garden. Parents were also assigned to high and low knowledge groups according to their knowledge of pollination biology. Findings suggest that parents who received training used the conversational strategies more than parents who used their natural conversational style. Parents and children who knew more about pollination at the start of the study exhibited higher levels of disciplinary talk in the garden. However, the use of the conversational strategies also increased the amount of disciplinary talk in the garden. The extent to which families engaged in disciplinary talk in the garden predicted significant variance in what children learned from the experience. An extended example illustrates how shared family noticing and conversation may support learning to observe nature.
This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy – Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points towards their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation.
This article argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework of habitus, field and symbolic capital has much to offer museum and heritage visitor studies. However, rather than focusing on his well-known critique of high-cultural taste, the discussion here concerns displays of the ‘ordinary’ and social histories - of occupations, crafts, places, communities. Habitus reveals how visitors to such sites are involved in making value judgments, not solely of aesthetics but also of the social identities on display. In particular, it directs analytic attention to the active positions that visitors take up during the visit. Instead of focusing on their immediate actions and responses, however, or on exhibitions alone, I approach the visit as a moment in a person’s life, where a relationship is constructed between an individual biography, a social field that assigns value to different identities, and the particular set of symbols encountered during the visit. It is suggested that these are appropriated as symbolic ‘tokens’ in accordance with individuals’ practical relation to the world they inhabit. Past experience, memory, and class become crucial here, as these illuminate the subjective stances visitors adopt to the symbols on display, which also involve important affective and non-ideational dimensions. Data from prior visitor research conducted by the author are reanalyzed to illustrate the points made. The aim is to show how visiting is a social practice that mobilises symbolic dimensions of memory and class experience, one which cannot be understood by examining exhibit-visitor interactions in isolation.
Key words: visitor studies, heritage, museums, Bourdieu, habits, symbolic capital.
It is widely agreed that there is a need to increase and widen science participation. Informal science learning environments (ISLEs), such as science museums, may provide valuable spaces within which to engage visitors—yet the visitor profile of science museums remains narrow. This paper seeks to understand the experiences of socially disadvantaged families within such spaces. Using a Bourdieusian analytic lens, we analyse qualitative data from a small study conducted with ten parents and ten children from an urban school who visited a large science museum. Data includes pre- and post-interviews, audio recordings and visit fieldnotes. We characterised families’ experiences as falling into three discourses, as ‘disorientating’, ‘fun’ or ‘meaningful’ visits. Analysis identifies how the families’ experiences, and the likelihood of deriving science learning from the visit, were shaped through interactions of habitus and capital. Implications for improving equity and inclusion within ISLEs are discussed.
Heritage sites and museums displaying history and culture are used in many different ways by visitors. Understanding the ways in which people use and engage with sites of heritage allows a greater understanding not only of the ways in which history and the past are understood, but more importantly how the past is actively used in the present by individuals. This use may range from the negotiation of contemporary social and political issues, aspects of personal, ethnic or national identity, and most importantly, the mediation of past and contemporary experiences that under pin ideas of identity.
From an early age, joint attention serves as a basis for parent–child communication. This study explored how increased joint attention (2 people knowingly focused on the same object) might lead to increased learning as 54 families explored dioramas in a natural history museum. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, the authors tested 2 interventions intended to increase parent–child (5–8 years of age) joint attention to objects in the dioramas. In one intervention, families used flashlights to explore darkened dioramas, thereby restricting the visual field, and in the other intervention, families were provided with signage prompts intended to focus attention on particular diorama features. Results showed that families who explored dioramas with flashlights were significantly more likely to establish joint attention compared to controls. Furthermore, once families established joint attention around an object, they were more likely to engage in learning talk about that object, suggesting that relatively simple manipulations of joint attention might be an effective means of supporting family learning in object-based learning environments such as natural history museums.
How can we best communicate to museum visitors the science that underlies the incredible images of space that are generated through the data collected from satellites and observatories? The Aesthetics and Astronomy Group, a collection of astrophysicists, space image developers, science communication experts, and research psychologists, has studied how individuals respond to space-image descriptions when viewing images on websites such as the Astronomy Picture of the Day and the Chandra telescope site. In this article, we turn our attention to the communication of scientific information in museum settings, in particular where the exhibit is comprised solely of images. We developed a traveling exhibition of space images expressly for this purpose, and interviewed 167 visitors to the exhibition at four major science museums. We asked the visitors what types of labels they preferred, what they would like to see in labels, and what impressed them about the images. The results of our efforts are presented here.
The theory of evolution by natural selection has revolutionized the biological sciences yet remains confusing and controversial to the public at large. This study explored how a particular segment of the public – visitors to a natural history museum – reason about evolution in the context of an interactive cladogram, or evolutionary tree. The participants were 49 children aged four to twelve and one accompanying parent. Together, they completed five activities using a touch-screen display of the phylogenetic relations among the 19 orders of mammals. Across activities, participants revealed similar misconceptions to those revealed by college undergraduates in previous studies. However, the frequency of those misconceptions was attenuated by the level of parental engagement, particularly the frequency of turn-taking between parents and children. Overall, these findings suggest that evolutionary reasoning may be improved by the kinds of collaborative discussions fostered by interactive museum displays, so long as the affordances of those displays encourage multiuser interactions.
Educators, docents, and interpreters are considered integral to the learning experiences at many museums. Although there is growing recognition that these staff members need professional development to effectively support visitor learning, there has been little research to describe their work or identify effective facilitation strategies. To address this need, we explored the nature of unstructured staff-facilitated family learning at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR, videotaping and inductively analyzing 65 unstructured staff-family interactions. The analysis highlighted the importance of role negotiation between staff and adult family members, particularly during the initiation of interactions, staff and visitor facilitation of family learning, and the introduction of new learning goals by staff members. Aligned with prior research on family learning in museums, adult family members played a critical role in shaping the nature of the interactions and determining the level of involvement of staff members. Findings have important implications for both future research and the professional development of staff.
Engaging senses in the museum experience design enables emotional visitor responses and makes the experience more memorable. The aim of this study was to discover a potential relationship between visual and aural stimuli and emotions to provide guidelines for the design of sensory museum experiences. To do so, the study used self-report and psychophysiological measures (skin conductance rate, zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii activity). The results indicated sound and visual stimulus to be equally accurate in inducing specific emotions on the self-report measures, while psychophysiological measures showed sound to cause higher arousal than visual stimuli for the majority of the emotions, joy to be more strongly elicited by means of sound, while sadness by visual stimuli. Guidelines for the designers of sensory museum experiences are provided at the end of the article. Future studies should try to confirm these findings on a more representative sample, using neuroimaging techniques.
Purpose
The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between ranges of affective components that have an impact on the revisit intention of museum visitors, in the context of a major city event. The study reveals the most significant factors that affect decision-making by applying the findings to a structural equation modelling (SEM) and conditional inference tree (CTree).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper utilises face-to-face survey research at the “Long Night of Museums” event in Saint Petersburg, 298 questionnaires were completed on the night of the event. The empirical part of the research is based on the SEM and interpreted by using the CTree. The SEM model measures the direct and indirect influence of the cognitive and affective components; the CTree enables the testing of both component and the joint effect they both produce.
Findings
This study shows a strong indirect correlation between the cognitive component of the major city event and the revisit intention of museum visitors. When focussing on affective components, both the SEM and the CTree demonstrated that attractiveness and atmosphere are revealed to be the most impactful elements regarding visitor retention and repeat custom. The research allows for a deeper understanding of visitor behaviours, intentions and their decision-making processes.
Practical implications
The results of the study allow museum managers to understand how to create repeat custom amongst visitors, by appreciating the importance of participation in major city events and the role that attraction and atmosphere play when creating intention for repeat visit. The research has uncovered which dimensions are the most important to visitors, and as a result, these particular dimensions should be thoroughly developed by museums in future in order to attract and repeat visits. This study has demonstrated the practical implications for museums participating in city events. When considering policy makers, this particular research provides an opportunity to develop recommendations for future city events, as well as using the CTree to assess and predict the effectiveness of visitor behaviour.
Originality/value
This is an original study which aims to integrate the impact of the perceived value of the cognitive component and a new range of affective elements regarding museum retention in the context of a major city event. The study includes newly developed dimensions of perceived value, as well as a unique focus on affective dimensions such as – atmosphere and attraction. Another point of originality is provided by using a CTree, which captures an in depth understanding of the intention formation process. This study provides an opportunity to advance our understanding of visitor decision-making processes.
This article studies the differences between first-time and repeat visitors to a large temporary exhibition at a natural history museum. Cued visitors were overtly observed and then interviewed. Compared to first-time visitors, repeat visitors generally visited museums more frequently and tended to be more interested in science. During the visit, they appeared more focused and selective. Repeat visitors engaged with fewer exhibits but spent more time on average engaging with single exhibits than did first-time visitors. There was no detectible tendency to use distant areas of the exhibit more during repeat visits. In comparison to first-time visitors, repeat visitors spent more time at interactive stations but less time at noninteractive exhibits.
Although museum visitor experience and satisfaction have received growing attention in academic research, the impact of new elements of the museum service model, including AR and VR, on visitor experience and satisfaction remains an unexplored area of investigation. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating how the innovation of museum service aspects (exhibition content, VR and AR, general organisation, and reception staff) can enhance visitor experiences and satisfaction, opening spaces for innovating museum service models. A quantitative survey methodology combining correlation analysis, Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA), descriptive statistics, and cluster analysis was conducted on a random sample of 739 museum visitors experiencing ‘The Ara It Was’ project at the Pacis Museum in Rome. Discussion and conclusions contribute to the debate on the disruptive power of AR and VR and its impact on service model innovation for cultural heritage museums. The paper proposes theoretical advances, has managerial implications for future improvements in museum management, and opens Museum 4.0 academic debate.
Visit motivation is a multidimensional construct that can be viewed as a convergence of various elements of a visitor’s personal context that lead him or her to visit a particular museum on a particular day. We explored associations between six visit motivation categories, four personal characteristics and three visit-related characteristics that have previously been linked to visit motivation and museum learning. Our main aim was to increase our understanding of how visit motivation is embedded in visitors’ wider personal context. Results showed an effect of visit company on two ‘social’ visit motivation categories, and positive correlations between three different visit motivation categories and visitors’ interest in science, their self-efficacy beliefs, their visit frequency and their visit strategy. Our findings help to better understand how visitors’ personal and visit-related characteristics are associated with their motivation to visit a science museum, which can ultimately support museum professionals in providing customized visit experiences.
Purpose
This paper aims to analyse the quality of experience in the Italian art museum context and to understand the mediating role of satisfaction between museum experiences and visitors' word-of-mouth (WOM) behavioural intentions.
Design/methodology/approach
This exploratory study adopted a quantitative methodology. Visitors to Italian art museums were interviewed, and the results were examined using exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis.
Findings
The analysis shows that the following museum experience dimensions were present in the Italian art museum context: aesthetics, escapism and “edumotion”. Further, these dimensions positively affected visitors' overall satisfaction which mediates on WOM behavioural intentions.
Research limitations/implications
The small sample limits the generalisability of findings, and further research on the topic is recommended.
Practical implications
Museums should allocate resources to improve visitor experience, visitor satisfaction and museum attractions. Specifically, museum managers should invest in the three dimensions that emerged from this study.
Originality/value
This study enriches the empirical evidence on experiential marketing in the museum context by focussing on the mediating role of overall satisfaction in the relationship between museum experience and WOM behaviours. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study investigating this phenomenon in Italian museums.
In natural history museums, a large part of the educational mission is to facilitate family learning with and about objects. Questions on object labels can play a role in this learning process. In the current study, we investigated the effect that different types of questions on object labels can have on the reasoning conversations among family members. We audio-recorded family conversations at an exhibit that included a fossilized dinosaur egg and a text label containing a question. Sixty-six families participated in three conditions differing in the level of complexity of the question on the label. We found that a question of moderate complexity facilitated the longest conversations, with the largest number of complex inferences, compared to the simpler and the more complex question. When reasoning, families most often used evidence from prior knowledge and other parts of the exhibition, but did not often relate to personal experiences. During the longer and more complex conversations, parents took up a larger role in the conversation, facilitating their family’s reasoning process. We suggest that open-ended, moderately complex questions on labels can facilitate family reasoning conversations. Providing enough context within the surrounding exhibits and connecting to prior knowledge may help the reasoning process.
This qualitative research explores the interactions of elementary school students during free-choice activity with science museum exhibits. The study participants were 39 students, who visited a science museum on six occasions during a three-year-period (from 4th to 6th grades). Our study showed that most interactions around exhibits are social in nature. Within these social interactions, students mainly discuss the technicalities of operating the exhibits and rarely engage with their scientific content. On occasion, exhibits are no more than settings for social interactions that could equally occur, for example, in the schoolyard. The main implications of this study concern exhibit design and pedagogy. Because students find ways to create their own social interactions in museum settings, museum pedagogy should leverage this social interaction into cognitive engagement with the scientific content of exhibits.
Although virtual and augmented reality are receiving increasing attention in tourism and cultural heritage, the effect of mixed reality on museum visitors’ experience has still not been fully answered, and research on this topic is still in its infancy. This paper aims to contribute to this debate proposing a novel model that measures the impact of mixed reality on museum visitors’ experience and satisfaction. ‘The Ara as It Was’, an innovative project enhancing the value of the Italian masterpiece, the Ara Pacis Museum, has been used to test this model. The discussion and conclusion open up new avenues of research.
Museums seek to provide visitors with memorable experiences. However, some visitors experience a hedonic decline and satiation after their visit. The present research aims to evaluate how the time spent, the route, and the anticipation of the visit might either prevent or further visitor satiation. A field study and a field experiment are performed. Findings reveal that spending more time in the museum and anticipating the content can increase the perceived satiation and diminish visitors' emotional response, although the attention level diminishes for short visits and when the content is not anticipated. In a real context, following a free route reduces perceived satiation, with visitors following a self-regulatory process and adapting the time spent to the level of satiation.
The main aim of the present study was to explore the impact of three stimulus-related variables—that is, ordinal position of viewing, relative size of exhibit objects, and proximity to larger sized objects—on visitor attention and interest in exhibitions. A field experiment that utilized timing and tracking through unobtrusive observation, as well as a questionnaire, was conducted with 120 participants in one control and three experimental conditions. The results suggest that (a) visitor attention declines across ordinal position, being interrupted in the experimental conditions by the presence of a larger object; (b) larger exhibit objects attract and hold more attention than smaller ones, especially those adjacent to (and appear before rather than after) the larger object; and (c) while larger objects attract more attention on an individual comparison, they seem to have a suppressing effect on the overall level of attention to the exhibition compared with the control condition.
This paper examines the asymmetric positive–negative relationship between interpretation environment service quality, museum visitor experience, and post-visit behavioral intentions. The researchers collected 406 valid questionnaires from visitors to the main exhibit building in the National Palace Museum. Results suggest that the asymmetric effect differs depending on the attribute being examined. When visitors reported their perceptions of personal and sociocultural interpretation environment services, negative perceptions had a larger impact on museum visitor experience than positive perceptions. Moreover, results suggest that museum visitor experience functions as a mediator between perceptions of interpretation environment service quality and post-visit behavioral intentions.
The museums' ability to attract young people is drawing the increasing interest of scholars and practitioners. However, little is known about the factors that influence the museums' attractiveness to young audience. To fill such a gap, this paper investigates the entire population of Italian museums (N = 4.967). A quantile regression model was used, in order to identify the variables that positively affected young people's visits to Italian museums. The research findings suggested that museums should devise tailored strategies to attract young people. Digital tools, interorganizational relationships, and ancillary services were found to be respectively critical for small‐sized, medium‐sized, and big‐sized museums.
Drawing from the extended technology acceptance model, we develop and test a model that links the perceived characteristics of mobile guide system to visitor satisfaction toward mobile guide system and its effect on overall museum experience. Data were collected from 408 museum visitors who have used mobile guide system in National Museum of Korea. The results found that perceived usefulness (PU), perceived enjoyment, and perceived interactivity had direct positive effects on visitor satisfaction toward mobile guide system. In addition, we found the moderating role of age between PU and satisfaction toward the mobile guide system. Furthermore, this study revealed that the experience of using museum mobile guide system was significantly associated with the overall experience of visiting the museum.
Motivations for visiting educational leisure settings (ELS) are a lasting research focus for academics and museum practitioners alike. Insights into visit motivations have proven valuable in drawing audiences, creating satisfying experiences and for better understanding visitors’ learning processes. However, the lack of an instrument offering a reasonable degree of measurement invariance to use across sites has challenged attempts to make valid comparisons across different types of ELS. We therefore developed a short scale to enable quick and valid comparisons of visit motivations across ELS and investigated its dimensionality, reliability and measurement invariance across three sites (science museum, art museum, zoo; N = 605). Our 17-item short scale captures six theoretically important visit motivation categories with sufficient reliability (ρ .65 < .85). Analysis indicates an approximate scalar invariance of factor loadings and item intercepts, allowing for a comparison of latent factor means across sites. Subsequently, we found plausible mean differences in visit motivation dimensions across ELS, providing preliminary evidence that the scale enables meaningful comparisons across sites.
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Children's developing reasoning skills are better understood within the context of their social and cultural lives. As part of a research-museum partnership, this article reports a study exploring science-relevant conversations of 82 families, with children between 3 and 11 years, while visiting a children's museum exhibit about mammoth bones, and in a focused one-on-one exploration of a "mystery object." Parents' use of a variety of types of science talk predicted children's conceptual engagement in the exhibit, but interestingly, different types of parent talk predicted children's engagement depending on the order of the two activities. The findings illustrate the importance of studying children's thinking in real-world contexts and inform creation of effective real-world science experiences for children and families.
Science museums can be excellent learning environments for engaging citizens in the complex societal issues of our time—such as climate change, fishery collapse, social prejudice, and wealth inequities—by fostering experimentation and metacognition about visitors' own social behaviors. The authors studied a low-cost metacognitive tool—Question Asking—in exhibit labels through a within-subjects, quasi-experimental research design with 59 randomly selected adult and teen dyads. Results indicated that the inclusion of an exhibit-specific question increased the proportion of time visitors spent in metacognitive conversations by at least a factor of three. Following that specific question with a more generally applicable real-world question maintained the already elevated proportion of time spent in metacognitive talk but did not boost that proportion further. The authors recommend including an exhibit-specific question at social science exhibits (and potentially adding another, broader real-world question as well) to prompt or enhance users' metacognitive responses to exhibit content.
Educational experiences can be influenced by novel experiences, yet educators often overlook the influence novelty exerts on students. This quasi-experimental study manipulated prior knowledge before a zoo field trip for 210 urban 7th-grade students from 2 schools, 1 comprised mostly of low-socioeconomic status (SES) families and 1 comprised mostly of middle-SES families. Students participated in 1 of 2 preparatory lessons, only 1 of which previewed field trip-related content, thereby increasing prior knowledge for half the students from each school. Prior knowledge significantly increased learner engagement, measured through attentiveness, from both schools, but in different types of behaviors. Students from the low-SES school demonstrated more attentiveness if their preparatory lesson previewed field trip material than if it was unrelated to the field trip. Students from the middle SES school displayed the same level of attentiveness in both conditions (and overall higher than the low-SES students). This study highlights complexities associated with prior knowledge and reveals strategies to help improve engagement levels for students visiting informal learning environments.
The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), in Australia's island state of Tasmania, bears all the hallmarks of the new museology and a flagship museum. Located in a largely working class area, there are expectations of visitors from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, particularly local residents. However most visitors are tourists, middle-class, and highly educated. In this article, the authors ask, “What are the issues affecting accessibility to MONA for local residents?” In asking this, they aim to better understand local engagement with MONA and shed light on potential socio-cultural transformation. Using a survey, interviews, and focus groups with local residents, the authors found that accessibility at MONA is defined along familiar socioeconomic lines, though there are indications of change that warrant further investigation. The expense of food and beverage, concern about children's behavior, and the explicit nature of some art all impact on accessibility, particularly for those with less cultural capital.
This article offers a historical and critical analysis of the preoccupations and problems covered by studies on evaluation since the first works by Gilman in 1911. It reveals the paradigms on which the studies were built, to illustrate the dynamics put in place, to question the objectives of evaluation, and to highlight the tensions between studies concerning cultural democratization and those linked to marketing. The following historical periods are thus presented: the beginnings, the 1920s to the 1950s, the war and the post-war years, and the 1960s to the 1980s. The heteronomy of the studies of visitors is also discussed.
Although commonly considered the core product offered by visitor attractions such as museums, zoos, and heritage sites, the visitor experience has proved a difficult construct to both define and measure. This article reviews the concept of visitor experience, drawing from literature in tourism and leisure research as well as museum and visitor studies, and identifies a number of issues on which the literature presents multiple perspectives. By clarifying these issues, this article takes a first step toward building a shared vocabulary to describe and measure visitor experiences. The article presents a conceptual scheme that describes relationships among key factors, and a multifaceted model of the visitor experience that offers a way of characterizing both its content and intensity. The article thus provides a basis for future research designed to capture this elusive phenomenon.
This chapter reports preliminary findings from visitor research being executed by one of the authors in a conurbation of the English Midlands. The fieldwork consists of fifteen in-depth interviews administered at a random sample of households and with a total of circa 35 subjects. The report places the research design in the theoretical contexts of class, culture and locality, presents data from three interviews and provides a detailed analysis of one interview. The data suggest:
(1) that local museums are mediators between identity and structure; (2) that museum meanings are diversely determined in relation to the class trajectories of subjects; (3) that museum visiting is to be understood as a social relationship rather than as an attribute of individuals and (4) that subjects readily conceptualize locality and identity through the visual vocabulary of museums and heritage sites.
This very practical book guides museums on how to create the highest quality experience possible for their visitors. Creating an environment that supports visitor engagement with collections means examining every stage of the visit, from the initial impetus to go to a particular institution, to front-of-house management, interpretive approach and qualitative analysis afterwards.
Visitor experiences and interpretation at wildlife tourism sites are often designed to encourage visitors to adopt conservation actions. Typically, conservation messages are delivered via one-size-fits-all interpretive signage, with little consideration given to whether the same information attracts and engages different cultural groups. This study explores Chinese and international visitors’ perceptions of signage at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China. Four sign prototypes were designed and a combination of visitor observations, interviews, and exit surveys were used to test their attracting and holding power. Comparisons of Chinese and Western visitors revealed no significant difference in the proportion who stopped to read signs. Preferences for signage elements were also similar across the two cultural groups; however, there were differences in terms of what visitors thought should be included in wildlife interpretation. Implications for the design and delivery of interpretation in Chinese wildlife tourism settings are discussed.
This study explores the linear and non-linear effects of previous experiences in a tourist destination (satisfaction and visit intensity) on the intention to return and to make a positive recommendation to others. We also consider the external drivers or the appeal of the destination as well as individuals' internal drivers as moderating factors in intensity-loyalty and satisfaction-loyalty relations. The analysis conducted on a sample of 687 tourists in a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Spain supports a non-linear effect of satisfaction on the intention to return. Moreover, time intense and expenditure intense visits positively impact the intention to return when the motivation for the trip is internal, yet have a negative effect if tourist motives are external.
This article examines the interaction between visitor motivation and in-museum visitor behavior. The authors postulate that, in order to understand this aspect of the dynamics of museum visiting, we need to view the motivations to visit the museum as lists compiled by individual visitors but also as part of wider lists of reasons for visiting that exist in society—which they refer to as cultural itineraries. Self-report methods have been used to capture patterns of motivation that emerge across the data, which in this case were used to examine their relation to visit strategies as manifested by visitor pathways through the London Zoo. Visitor pathways were captured through the novel use of mobile location-sensing technology which offers distinct opportunities in this context that have been unexplored in audience research. The combination of standard research methodology and automated location tracking used in this study allowed us to indentify two distinct visit strategies that directly relate to social groupings with different motivations: (a) groups with an education/participation motivation, who visit exhibits only, and (b) groups with a social event motivation, who spend a considerable amount of time on nonexhibit related activities and socializing with other family members and friends.
Research has demonstrated that conversations among museum, aquarium, and zoo visitors can be a clear indication of active learning, engagement, and participation in scientific reasoning. This descriptive study sought to determine the extent of talk about ecology-related topics exhibited by family groups visiting marine touch tanks at four Pacific coast aquariums. In particular, conversations were examined to determine the kinds of ecology topics discussed and the influence of exhibit features such as tank format and interpretive staff interactions on the extent of talk about ecological topics. Findings suggest limited talk about ecology by families during their visit to the exhibit – regardless of whether the tank resembled a real tidepool habitat or not. However, data revealed that talk about ecology between guests and staff was significantly longer than was ecology-talk among guests only, suggesting that supplemental interpretation by staff members or volunteers may be necessary to explicitly encourage such discourse at touch tanks.
The mass media are ranked with respect to their perceived helpfulness in satisfying clusters of needs arising from social roles and individual dispositions. For example, integration into the sociopolitical order is best served by newspaper; while "knowing oneself" is best served by books. Cinema and books are more helpful as means of "escape" than is television. Primary relations, holidays and other cultural activities are often more important than the mass media in satisfying needs.
Television is the least specialized medium, serving many different personal and political needs. The "interchangeability" of the media over a variety of functions orders televisions, radio, newspapers, books, and cinema in a circumplex. We speculate about which attributes of the media explain the social and psychological needs they serve best. The data, drawn from an Israeli survey, are presented as a basis for cross-cultural comparison.