Why People Visit Museums and Galleries: Key Theories of Visitor Studies and Methodologies

Museums are becoming more aware of their increasing need for visitors’ studies. This information is used in various ways such as decision making, improving the experience and establishing relationships between the museum and the local community. Museums are trying to listen and be responsive to the public’s needs and interest. Through the provided feedback museums develop programming, museums space and exhibitions. They also measure the social impact on the public value, which can be used as feedback to stakeholders, board members, and sponsors. The essay will outline some of the key theories of visitor studies and methodologies which are currently in practice, and address how useful these studies are in finding out why people visit museums and galleries. Focusing on Quantitative methods, I will outline the way in which visitor motivations can be reviewed through evaluation techniques and surveys. Through Qualitative methods, I will address the way in which museums utilize focus groups and written feedback.

Quantitative methods focus on audience segmentation such as demographics and attitudes that can be quantified. The quantitative method is for researches that require statistics, the results are very well measured and of high credibility. They are clear, well-defined variables. Quantitative can gather information such as the percentage of locals versus tourists visiting the museum, how far do visitors live from the museum, how many regular visitors versus unique visitors. In this method, research can use tools such as surveys, open-ended and closed-ended questions, systematic tracking and observation of visitors.

Doering’s key theory is that museums visitors come with “different entrance narratives” and expectations of visiting. In order to cater towards museum visitors, museums have increasingly started using an evaluation method. The mixed method combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. It is the most detailed and inclusive method. Korn states that ‘‘evaluation’ is the systematic collection of data and information about the characteristics, activities and outcomes of an exhibition or public program”. It provides different perspectives on the same issue by providing both measurement and understanding of it. It includes one to one interviews, open-ended questions, focus groups and tracking. Although not used widely in Britain, the evaluation methodology is used in the United States, in order to gain further funding and prove exhibitions are worth the grants. It is tailored to have a problem-solving focus that asks questions about specific processes or outcomes.

The evaluation method is conducted in four different stages of the exhibitions: Front-end Evaluation, Formative Evaluation, Summative Evaluation and remedial Evaluation. Front-end Evaluation takes place in the development phase of an exhibition, it assists in goal setting, “exhibit layout, terminology, approaches to motivating visitors attention and interest, text formats, headlines, graphics and, particularly, to deal with distortions that occur from visitors preconceptions about the exhibit's topic”. Through this approach, visitors’ perspective of the exhibition topic can be explored. Titles, script ideas, and themes can be tested. Tools used can be both qualitative and quantitative.

Formative Evaluation is used during the planning stages, it tests the current plan and modifies the development process. Through the formative approach, visitors understanding, reading and viewing of the exhibition can be explored. The qualitative tools are mainly used in this stage. Remedial Evaluation identity modification after the opening of an exhibition, which is a refinement of an exhibition after it has opened. Both qualitative and quantitative tool is used.

Summative Evaluation is used when after the exhibition ends. It measures the impact and outcome. Value needs to be defined to measure the success of this phase. This phase produced the final report that can be used as a reference for sponsors or directors. While evaluation is a very effective approach to collect information, the resources needed make it difficult to apply it frequently. The main resources needed are time and staff. Dedicated trained staff or external consultants are budget consuming. It is also time-consuming if selected, it needs to be integrated as part of the budget and time frame of the exhibition and program. Despite these disadvantages, the evaluation approach has proven its usefulness and effectiveness. It introduces shared authority in the planning and execution of an exhibition or a program.

Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania has used evaluations to help with the creation and modification of a junior gallery. A front-end Evaluation took place in the planning phase of the gallery. The interactive components for the results provided the staff with feedback to design the content of each activity prior to the exhibition, during the exhibition, a formative evaluation was run to evaluate both the quality and value of each activity. Some components were altered and improved based on the feedback. The finding of this evaluation assisted the staff members to create activities that helped visitors get a better understanding of the exhibition and the collection. The interpretive path was set in a collaboration between the visitors and the museum professionals. Surveys can allow museums to understand, demographics such as age and gender, or geography, local or tourist and even the Socio-economic and educational levels of their visitors.

The usefulness of knowing demographics allows the museum to understand who visits the museum but not necessarily help them attract more visitors. In 2013, user surveys were conducted in around 200 cultural organizations and museums in Denmark. The survey focused on four contemporary challenges faced by these organizations: identity and learning behaviors, space for intercultural dialogue, gender equality and cultural tourism. The survey was made of short structured questionnaires. The questionnaire asked the visitors about their experience in the museum. It questioned their motivation to visit the museum, dividing the answers into two categories: recharger and explorer. ‘Recharger (I am here to recharge my batteries and to find peace and quiet and time for introspection…)’ or ‘Explorer (I am curious and interested. I am here today to gain new knowledge and inspiration)’. John Falk and Lynn Dierking (2012) developed visitor profiles, where they highlighted visitors could have various motivations for visiting museums at any given day. Explorer, facilitator, experience seeker, professional and recharger are profiles they identified. The museum and its staff cannot know what profile the visitor is taking on when they enter the museum however the strategy allows the museums to divide visitors into segments and help facilitate better engagement such as creating specific routes and maps for some of the profiles, to customizing experiences. The results of the survey lead several papers to be written reflecting on the four challenges facing the museum.

Collecting Data using closed questions survey allows researchers to obtain straightforward report analysis. This is appropriate for large samples, yet, it is arguable that some of the information collected using this method is considered superficial and narrow to measure the visitor experiences (museum practices daidson). Surveys can allow museums to understand, demographics such as age and gender, or geography, local or tourist and even the Socio-economic and educational levels of their visitors. The usefulness of knowing demographics allows the museum to understand who visits the museum but not necessarily help them attract more visitors. Qualitative data focuses on visitor expectations, motivations and needs. Visitor studies are relatively new in museum studies, due to museums shifting from traditionally focusing on preservation and exhibitions of objects to educating and sharing information about their collection which Doering recognizes.

In order to study visitors, Falk and Dierking are key theorists who developed a contextual model of learning, identifying motivations, incentives and expectations of why people visit museums. Taking into account the personal, socio-cultural and physical context as well as time flow the qualitative method provides in-depth answers and investigations. Founded data explores visitors’ perspectives and interpretation of the world. Through the qualitative method, researchers are able to assure the inclusions of various community voices, such as minorities. It helps the researcher to understand the response to museum experiences, the route they take and their reactions to the collections. A more recent example of utilizing various methods is through qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, surveys and focus groups is John Bull and Shaikha Al Thani (2011) research focusing on the needs of family audiences in Qatar. Through the research they found six key findings such as social motivation playing a key factor in museum visits, to understanding that families often were led by the mother and parents and children often ignored hands on exhibits. While utilizing these methods can be very time consuming and costly, the usefulness of this visitor research was important due to the lack of visitor research in Qatar and the lack of family visits in museums identified by Bull and Al Thani, this provided key indications to allow museums to understand the needs and modes of learning and implement it within future exhibits and understand how families in Qatar valued and perceived museums. Hudson (1975) notes that meeting the needs of every person cannot be done, but identifying reasons to why they visit allow museums to cater to those specific needs.

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, a key theorist on museums and visitors, stated “people from different backgrounds have different perceptions and interests in relation to museum exhibitions”. However a key issue is that prior experiences and social interactions affect decision making of the visitor, therefore a key methodology in gaining an insight to prior experiences of visitors is through focus groups. Museums can be places were visitors feel uncomfortable or intimidated especially with previous experiences being negative. Therefore focus groups are a useful way to invite minority communities to voice their opinion in a setting which in turn allows the museum to respond to their needs and form relationships with them. Focus groups are typically focused, they gather large amounts of qualitative data rapidly. Frequently used in museums front-end studies, focus groups consist of five to twelve participants from the general public that are invited to closed in-depth discussion sessions. During these sessions, attendees are asked to share their perspective on specific topics or experiences. An advantage is that Information gathered during focus groups are collectively negotiated rather than individual perspectives. An experienced well-trained facilitator is needed to be able to assure the quality of the data.

Compared to surveys or questionnaires, focus groups are costly therefore not many museums engage in such practices but when they do, it proves successful. Ontario Science Center in North York, Canada held a focus group focused on communication before hiring a new advertising agency. The focus group results helped in identifying various audience segments leading to a new marketing campaign that attracted new visitors. Another key qualitative methodology is written feedback. Collecting written comments is an increasingly popular method to collect feedback, it allows visitors to offer their ideas, views, and feedback without feeling pressured overwhelmed. The simple and cost-effective way is assisting in collecting visitors information. A simple and cost-effective way, written comments has been increasingly placed as part exhibitions recently. They allow museum professionals a chance for an insight into visitor’s perspectives. Written feedbacks are gathered in different ways such as comment books and visitor cards, sometimes combined with other tools such as interviews or surveys. A disadvantage facing this tool is the restricted representation based on participation self-selecting nature, not all of the museum and program visitors will be using this tool making the feedback limited. When reading the feedback, It is important to keep in mind the context in which the comments were written in, as the comments are “socially situated performances”.

Conclusions

Visitor studies are initiated to maintain the successful relationship between the museum and the public. Exhibitions and programs need to be visitors focused through evaluations and visitors research. Museum Visitors studies provide a foundation to base improvements and developments in issues such as collaborations, programming, exhibition design and on. Visitor studies could, then, do more to address the issue of who ‘speaks’ for museum audiences in research - as Museums and Communities reveals there are lots of discussion about who represents and speaks for communities in the museum but when it comes to writing about those experiences, do we all too readily take for granted the authority of the author? As we see in these five examples, the perceptions of museum audiences towards the themes covered in each of the books is unknown – we know that museums are important for health and wellbeing, for community representation, but where are the voices of the public to support this contention? I would like to see more examination of how we can include visitors’ (and non-visitors’) voices within these discussions, which will perhaps help to really embed the value of museums within the public consciousness.