Hi Ido, I did indeed write a paper on this topic in 2001, presenting it at a Museums Australia conference in Canberra. Basically the study involved a series of exit surveys conducted from November 1999 to January 2001 with visitors to the Australian Museum, Sydney. Questions were designed to see what factors identified from the literature influenced reasons given for visiting museums and galleries generally, and the Australian Museum in particular. 413 visitors were asked to rate eleven indicators on a 5-point Likert-scale, with 1 being low and 5 high. From both looking at the data and a literature review I developed a model of museum visiting which included the following five highest rating factors (in order):
- experiencing something new
- entertainment
- learning
- the interests of children/family
- doing something worthwhile in leisure
There was not much discrimination between factors based on the relatively small variation between standard deviations (from 1.04 to 1.51), which suggested to me that these are probably the main drivers for visitors to museums.
The model I proposed is below. This is further explained in the paper you asked about, which I have posted on my Audience Research wiki (go down the page to find it).
I haven't re-looked at this for awhile now so be interested in any feedback.
3 comments:
Ido replied with this comment: My problem is that the material is about museums in Australian only and I'm searching for something more general.
Ido, if you look at the bibliography in the paper there are general references there. The major two are the Hood 1995 and Falk 1998 papers which are quite general, although based on data. In Chapter One of my thesis, which can be found here, there is a section on why peple visit and a pretty comprehensive bibliography of studies done in UK, US and Europe.
Hi all. At the risk of being very self-serving, I could point to the article “The ‘Museum Constant’: One-third plus or minus a bit”, Visitor Studies Today, 8(2), 2005, 1 – 7. It brings a tiny bit of internationalism to the issue of reasons for visiting.
Rob
Thanks Rob. I'd forgotten about that paper. I did do a blog post on your paper here
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