Museum Attendance Research Articles

Weather conditions and museum attendance: a case-study from Sicily

This paper evaluates whether and how weather conditions affect museum attendance. As a case study, we examine the daily attendance at the Museo Regionale della Ceramica (Regional Museum of Ceramics) in Caltagirone, Sicily (Italy), over the period starting from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2016. In addition to the daily and monthly fixed effects and the influence of tourism, which are investigated by the available literature, we document a significant effect of weather conditions, specifically temperature and rainfall, which work in an asymmetric way across the different seasons. Temperature has a significant non-monotonic effect on museum attendance, with an increase having a positive impact in low-temperature (non-summer) months and a negative impact in high-temperature (summer) season; rainfalls encourage museum visits but only during summer months. Some long-term projections concerning the impact of weather modifications upon museum attendance due to climate change are proposed and discussed.

Показатель посещаемости музеев как фактор проявления социально-культурных потребностей населения регионов России

The concept of people’s social and cultural needs is investigated on the basis of museum attendance statistics. The methodological approaches taken in this study are the analysis of the Federal State Statistics Service data for 2007-2016 and a survey of secondary sociological data of the Russian Public Opinion Research Center in 2012, 2016. The author identifies that social and cultural needs of society are also the cultural wealth of the individual as they transform the properties of society into cultural capital. Museum attendance rate is to demonstrate the value-based behavior of people, their interest in the spiritual sphere of society, a desire to increase the cultural level of the person. This rate has been analyzed in both all-Russian and regional contexts. It has been examined in isolation in the Volga Federal District, in particular in the Republic of Bashkortostan. The study reveals a positive trend in museum attendance in Russia (attendance rate has increased to 52.5% by 2016) and the Republic of Bashkortostan (74.8% by 2016). Such trends are confirmed by sociological data. In the respondents’ opinion, museum attendance has increased by a factor of 1.4 from 2012 to 2016. It reflects the relevant growing social and cultural needs and new opportunities to meet them.

“Lies, damn lies and statistics”: a history of museum visits in Australasia

ABSTRACTWhile a great deal of attention has been paid to museum visit data in the last few decades, very little is known about long-term trends. This article examines the distinctive history of museum visits in Australasia through a comparative study of eight key institutions from across the region. Archival research was undertaken at each institution to compile as complete as possible a data set of annual visitation from opening until present day. Any stated changes in funding, admission charges, buildings etc. were also recorded, along with comments indicating contemporary explanations for fluctuations in visitation. Sources included official documents such as annual reports and trustee minutes, as well as visitor books and attendance records. We provide an initial overview of the quantitative and contextual data we collected from the case study museums focusing on a number of key questions: How have museums in Australasia been counting and reporting visit data over the past 150 years? What does this reveal about changes over time in the perceived value of visit data and museum attitudes towards their visitors? What are the key trends in museum attendance at the local, national and regional level in Australia and New Zealand? What contemporary explanations were given for fluctuations in museum attendance and are they supported by a long-term, cross-institutional comparison of the data? The study provides insights into historical shifts in thinking about the importance of visitors, appropriate methods for recording visitation, and the value of this data. The findings are also relevant to how museums today interpret attendance figures. The ways in which visit data were included or excluded from historical narratives about the value of museums highlights the constructed nature of visitor data and raises questions about the role of visitor research in contemporary museums.

Terrorism and Wine Tourism: The Case of Museum Attendance

AbstractIn this article, we use attendance data from La Cité du Vin, a wine museum in the city of Bordeaux, to assess the impact of the recent wave of terror that affected France on wine tourism. We use recent count regression estimation techniques suited for time series data to build a prediction model of the demand for attendance at this museum. We conclude that the institution lost about 5,000 visitors over 426 days, during which 14 successive terrorist attacks took place. This corresponds to almost 1% of the total number of visitors in the sample period. (JEL Classifications: L83, Z30)

Cultural engagement and cognitive reserve: museum attendance and dementia incidence over a 10-year period.

Theories of cognitive reserve, disuse syndrome and stress have suggested that activities that are mentally engaging, enjoyable and socially interactive could be protective against the development of dementia. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, this study shows that for adults aged 50 and older visiting museums every few months or more was associated with a lower incidence rate of dementia over a 10-year follow-up period compared with less-frequent visiting. This association was independent of demographics, socioeconomic status, health-related variables including sensory impairment, depression, vascular conditions and other forms of community engagement. Visiting museums may be a promising psychosocial activity to support the prevention of dementia.Declaration of interestNone.

Mornings at the Museums: A Family Friendly Early Childhood Program

ABSTRACTThe pilot program, Morning at the Museum (MAM), was offered to children (ages 3–5) and their caregivers weekly for six weeks at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art (RHMAA). Both children and adults explored RHMAA through hands-on activities that encouraged play, movement, observation, music, and art-making. Each session explored a theme (shapes, color, farm, etc.), woven into sensory play, the featured artwork of the day, story time, spaces in the historic house, and an art-making experience. Through MAM, RHMAA used educationally defined ingredients to create a developmentally appropriate learning experience spanning two age groups, young children and adults, with the goal of fostering a lifelong interest in museum learning and attendance.

Non-profit Firm Models and Museum Demand Estimation

A version of Hansmann (1981) economic model of non profit institutions is analyzed to derive museums pricing schedules. These are paired with demand for museum attendance derived from utility maximisation by heterogeneous consumers that care for museum characteristics, in order to provide an empirical strategy to identify museum demand based on the usual micro database including museum prices, attendance and characteristics, as well as socio demographic indicators of hosting towns. Following the empirical literature we address the endogeneity of observed prices and the large number of zero price observations. To tackle them we propose an instrumental variable estimation, while also using selection correction techniques. The model is estimated using data from the 2007 Census of Uruguayan Museums. We do not find a significant effect of price on attendance.

Getting Up-close and Personal with Aunt May and Uncle Jim

On Friday the 28th of May 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that museum attendance had reached a record high of 1,058,700. The upward trend started in the fifties but really took off in the sixties. The rise in museum attendance was the result of an economic boom, better education and an increase in leisure time. It was also stimulated by a growing mediatisation of both the arts and the different activities of museums and art institutions. On the whole, journalists, curators, museum educators and critics enthusiastically welcomed the increased interest in the arts. But the growing mediatisation of the museum, art and exhibitions as well as the continued growth of the public’s interest in art was met by some with scepticism, not least from the artists themselves. They realised that they were no longer working for a privileged and specialist audience but for a large, demanding anonymous crowd. And it worried some of them. The way artists reacted to this institutional change – their reaction, both in art and writing – has received little scholarly attention. This essay looks at how two artists, Bruce Nauman and Allan Kaprow, responded to it and how it possibly affected their work as well as their artistic identity. We will see that their concerns about the presence of the audience led them to eradicate the distance between both the work of art and the audience as well as – in some sorts - between the artist himself and the audience. What is interesting here is that the eradication of distance is, so it seems, a direct consequence of a distrust, a rather pessimistic feeling. Controlling the aesthetic process and response seemed to be their guiding principle.

Rain and museum attendance: Are daily data fine enough?

I investigate the intraday effects of rain on the demand for indoor leisure. To do so, I use sub-daily museum attendance and weather data to reveal a dynamic response to precipitation that would be obscured using day-level data. I find that the magnitudes and signs of the effects of rainfall vary significantly throughout the day. In some hours, the predicted increase in visitors is nearly three times larger than would be expected from estimates using daily measures. Many individuals appear to actively adjust their plans throughout the day in response to rain, while others’ attendance depends upon prior weather forecasts of rain. Further analysis reveals that visit duration also increases during rainy periods, and visitors are more likely to attend pay-to-enter special exhibits. International visitors make up a greater share of total visitors during periods of observed precipitation. More broadly, this paper establishes the viability and value of working with widely available sub-daily rainfall data to uncover these dynamics.

Learning at the museum

Museum attendance is often seen as a chance for visitors to learn and thus increase their cultural capital. However, a share of the visitors may decide to attend museums for reasons other than cultural capital accumulation. This article investigates whether learning process takes place also in the case of tourists whose main motivation for the visit is recreational. Different attitudes towards cultural consumption may have a role in explaining visit length, seen as a proxy for learning. We present an empirical analysis of the determinants of both willingness to stay and actual length of stay at a museum. Evidence is based on a survey of tourists visiting the Italian museum of Vittoriale. Generalized ordered logit under partial proportional odds assumption and Cox proportional hazard models are used to assess the role of the covariates. A set of economic, socio-demographic, trip-related and psychographic controls is tested, with particular emphasis on motivation.

Suicide Mortality in Russia: Do Urban Men React to Economic Fluctuations More than Women?

Suicides have a considerable effect on the labour supply due to its high place in the list of mortality causes of working age population. However, many countries do not conduct a suicide preventive policy. The Russian Federation is one of them, but its suicide mortality rates are falling since the beginning of 2000's. In this paper the issue of suicide mortality of working age population is considered in terms of the influence of economic fluctuations on suicidal behavior specific to gender. The hypothesis about the gender difference was confirmed: the reaction of men’s suicidal mortality rates to increase of economic factors (real GRP growth rate and income per capita) is negative and significant, while women’s is insignificant. Besides that, crude marriage and divorce ratio are also significant for men: marriages with negative effect on suicide rates and divorces with positive. Crude birth rates are positive and significant and total dependency ratio is negative and significant for both sexes. Dependency ratio with distinction for child and aged shows ambiguous result. Number of physicians per capita and museum attendance per head are insignificant.

Frequency of museum attendance: motivation matters

Some recent empirical contributions have highlighted that tourists often go to museums yet appear to extract little utility from the experience. We argue that this is often the case with agents who visit museums only while on holiday and results from a temporary lack of substitute experience goods or compliance with a must-do list. If such agents behaved according to Stigler and Becker’s rational addiction theory, they would also visit museums while at home. However, most do not, which makes them constantly occasional consumers. We indirectly test for the presence of constantly occasional museum attendance by tourists, using data from a survey conducted in 2012 at Vittoriale, the most popular museum at Lake Garda, a renowned Italian tourist destination. By applying multiple correspondence analysis to a question on motivations to visit the museum, we obtain two dimensions of motivation: one based on a search for knowledge and the other based on a more recreational attitude. Identification of the latter is a new finding in itself. We include these dimensions as regressors in a model used to explain museum attendance. We find, as expected, that light consumption negatively affects attendance. We therefore argue that empirical analyses of museum attendance should not disregard light motivation as a possible driver.

Predictors of Perceptions of Scientists

The 2001 and 2012 National Science Foundation surveys of public attitudes and knowledge about science were used to model perceptions of scientists and explore whether the predictors of such perceptions have changed over time. The available data indicate that the relative impact of the available predictors changed in only minor ways between the two time periods. Predictors of views about scientists include age, gender, and scientific knowledge, regardless of time period. Science museum attendance and primary source of science news were only rarely significant predictors. A limitation of the modeling is that the available predictors do a relatively poor job predicting both positive and negative views about scientists. This may suggest the need to reconsider which questions get included in the biennial National Science Foundation science and technology survey or the measures used to assess views about scientists.

In the white cube: Museum context enhances the valuation and memory of art

Art museum attendance is rising steadily, unchallenged by online alternatives. However, the psychological value of the real museum experience remains unclear because the experience of art in the museum and other contexts has not been compared. Here we examined the appreciation and memory of an art exhibition when viewed in a museum or as a computer simulated version in the laboratory. In line with the postulates of situated cognition, we show that the experience of art relies on organizing resources present in the environment. Specifically, artworks were found more arousing, positive, interesting and liked more in the museum than in the laboratory. Moreover, participants who saw the exhibition in the museum later recalled more artworks and used spatial layout cues for retrieval. Thus, encountering real art in the museum enhances cognitive and affective processes involved in the appreciation of art and enriches information encoded in long-term memory.

Visiting Science Museums During Middle and High School: A Longitudinal Analysis of Student Performance in Science

This exploratory analysis of student attendance at science museums finds that student achievement in science and mathematics is somewhat higher for those students who visited science museums frequently during the school year or summer. The strength of the association with cognitive achievement is sufficiently noteworthy to encourage further analysis of the role of informal activities such as museum attendance on cognitive learning. The association of cognitive performance with science museum visiting was found to be only partially a product of student selectivity of parents with higher educational levels or prior achievement at earlier grades. However, student attitudes of science efficacy, utility, and anxiety in middle school were not found to be predictive or a result of frequent science museum attendance or achievement in later high school years, although attitudes and cognitive achievement did become more aligned by the 12th grade. But, no evidence is found in the analysis of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (1987–1993) and the 2009 High School Longitudinal Survey that visiting science museums was associated with reversing the typical trend of decline in student reports of science self-efficacy or beliefs in the utility of science during high school years.

Intangible Challenges in the Management of Tangible Cultural Heritage in Kuwait

Kuwait’s tangible cultural heritage in the form of museums, historic buildings, and archaeology has not always been valued highly: much of the fabric of the old town has been demolished, museum attendance has been low, and Kuwait’s considerable archaeology is not well understood by the majority of local residents. The cultural background to this situation is examined in this paper, demonstrating a mismatch of local values to the current Western-influenced approaches to heritage, and suggesting alternative approaches.

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Although the U.S. population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, research indicates that minority participation in the arts continues to decline. This article addresses the racial disparity of public art museum attendance by examining the role of the art museum curator and the process by which concepts of race are reproduced within the space of the public art museum. Utilizing Bourdieu's theories of cultural reproduction, social space, and symbolic power as a preliminary framework of inquiry, we examine the concept of whiteness as privileged social construct. Through face‐to‐face in‐depth interviews with museum curators, we investigate the means by which the dominant cultural narrative of whiteness is maintained through the preferences, decisions, and social interactions of curators. We draw upon critical white studies, a part of critical race theory, to underline the manner in which whiteness presents itself as a position of dominance. Our findings show that whiteness is maintained through the process of exclusion by presenting the white cultural narrative as both ordinary and invisible.

Developing the Museum Experience: Retailing in American Museums 1945–91

Museum shops in America were created immediately after World War II (WWII) from what previously were termed museum sales or information desks. Museum retail occurred as a response to increased museum attendance and consumer spending by Americans in the post-war economy. Distinct changes such as mass consumption, the rise of individualism and cultural pluralism, and the modern consumer’s search for novelty, nostalgia, and later high culture, all affected museum responses to visitor needs and museum shop development. As a result, shops were popular and successful throughout the era even in times of general decline in the national economy. Museums, however, did not focus on shops as revenue generators until the 1980s when public support and governmental funding for museums retracted. The manner in which shops contributed to the total museum experience was an important component of museum development.

Museums as a Venue for Public Health Intervention

Big Food: Health, Culture, and the Evolution of Eating broke numerous records for museum attendance, highlighting the public's appetite for public health. During its 10-month run at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, more than 120 000 visitors attended Big Food, including 25 000 students through the museum's public education program, an increase of 30% more than the average student attendance in the past decade. Big Food cost approximately $100 000 to build, comprising printed panels and objects, installation displays (e.g., custom-built cases to house such objects as sugar-sweetened beverages and healthy and diseased organs), temporary walls, video monitors, food products, and more. At less than $1 per visitor, this provided extraordinary public health value.

Cultural Tourism in Greece at a Time of Economic Crisis

Cultural Tourism in Greece at a Time of Economic Crisis