Visitor Studies Research Articles

Remembered experiences and revisit intentions: A longitudinal study of safari park visitors

Tourism is an experience-intensive sector in which customers seek and pay for experiences above everything else. Remembering past tourism experiences is also crucial for an understanding of the present, including the predicted behaviours of visitors to tourist destinations. We adopt a longitudinal approach to memory data collection from psychological science, which has the potential to contribute to our understanding of tourist behaviour. In this study, we examine the impact of remembered tourist experiences in a safari park. In particular, using matched survey data collected longitudinally and PLS path modelling, we examine the impact of positive affect tourist experiences on the development of revisit intentions. We find that longer-term remembered experiences have the strongest impact on revisit intentions, more so than predicted or immediate memory after an event. We also find that remembered positive affect is temporally unstable and declines over time.

Probing the Link between Biodiversity‐Related Knowledge and Self‐Reported Proconservation Behavior in a Global Survey of Zoo Visitors

AbstractMany environmental communication interventions are built on the assumption that increased knowledge will lead to changes in proenvironment behaviors. Our study probes the link between biodiversity‐related knowledge and self‐reported proconservation behavior, based on the largest and most international study of zoo visitors ever conducted. In total, 6,357 visitors to 30 zoos from 19 countries around the globe participated in the study. Biodiversity understanding and knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity were significantly related, but only 0.6% of the variation in knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity could be explained by those same respondents’ biodiversity understanding. Biodiversity understanding was only the sixth most important variable in significantly predicting knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity. Moreover, biodiversity understanding was the least important variable of those that were significantly related to self‐reported proconservation behavior. Our study indicates that knowledge is a real, but relatively minor, factor in predicting whether members of the public – zoo visitors in this case – will know about specific proenvironment behaviors they can take, let alone whether they will actually undertake such behaviors.

Re-Paying Attention to Visitor Behavior: A Re-Analysis using Meta-Analytic Techniques.

The present study describes a meta-analytic review of museum visitors' behavior. Although there is a large number of visitor studies available, their cumulative importance has not been determined due to the lack of rigorous methods to determine common causes of visitors' behaviors. We analyzed Serrell's (1998) database of 110 studies, defining a number of variables that measure visitors' behaviors in exhibition spaces which exceeded the most typical and obvious ones. We defined four indexes of effect size and obtained their combined estimates: average time per feature [ATF● = 0.43 (0.49; 0.37)], percentage of diligent visitors [dv● = 30% (0.39; 0.23)], inverse of velocity [Iv● = 4.07 min/100m2 (4.55; 3.59)], and stops per feature [SF● = 0.35 (0.38; 0.33)], and we analyzed the role of relevant moderating variables. Key findings indicate, for example, that the visiting time for each display element relates to the size of the exhibition and its newness, and visitor walking speed is higher in large exhibit areas. The indexes obtained in this study can be understood as references to be used for comparison with new evaluations. They may help to predict people's behavior and appreciation of new exhibitions, identifying important problems in museum designs, and providing new research tools for this field.

Art Appreciation as a Learned Competence: A Museum-based Qualitative Study of Adult Art Specialist and Art Non-Specialist Visitors

Since Bourdieu, it has been argued that art appreciation requires “knowledge”. The focus of this qualitative study was to examine art appreciation as a learned competence by exploring two different groups of museum visitors: art specialists and art non-specialists. The research was conducted at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Twenty-three adults were recruited and accompanied during their visit to the museum. Participants were requested to “think out loud”, which meant to talk about what they saw, thought, and felt about the artworks. There was a short interview conducted with each participant before entering the museum to gain insight into their art-related and museum-visiting experience. The analysis of the data revealed that some processes of art appreciation were similar within the two groups. Both art specialists and art nonspecialists interact with museum objects physically and intellectually; they see contents and formal qualities as a whole; they respond emotionally to artworks; appreciation includes their personal experience; they search museum interpretation/information for their understanding. Some noticeable differences were found. Art specialists respond to artworks with more understanding and are willing to put more effort into art appreciation, whereas art non-specialists respond with less understanding and put less effort into art appreciation. This paper focuses on the differences between the two groups; reflective and spontaneous appreciation of art, objective and subjective appreciation of art and the effort put into art appreciation. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the study for the teaching of art and museum education.

Shoppers in the Spiritual Supermarket: A Quantitative Study of Visitors to Scandinavia’s Largest Alternative Fair

Presenting data from a quantitative survey (N=362) at ‘The Great Alternative Fair’ in Lillestrøm, Norway, this article explores the demographic and religious profiles of the ‘customers’ in the ‘spiritual marketplace’. Many adhere to ideas that are historically associated with different religious traditions. At the same time, there are strong positive statistical correlations between belief in alternative ideas, such as healing, reincarnation, channelling, and clairvoyance. This indicates that such ideas constitute a clustered and shared set of beliefs. Against this background, the article questions the widely held assumption that people who are oriented towards alternative spiritualities are independent of institutions and authorities and it argues that they are informed to a large extent by a set of collective resources. It is suggested that the marketplace, which constitutes a common framework of interaction, plays a key role in connecting various ideas and actors and in creating a common ideological profile.

Enhancing our understanding of museum audiences: visitor studies in the twenty-first century

Enhancing our understanding of museum audiences: visitor studies in the twenty-first century

Telling the Story of Welsh Art-But Is Anyone Listening?

Since the devolution of political authority was introduced to Wales, the museums and culture sector has been increasingly influenced by the political sector. One aspect of the culture sector to become a focus for Welsh politicians has been the idea of establishing a National Gallery for Wales. This has increased pressure on the National Museum Wales, the body which would be responsible for creating a National Gallery, to revisit its approach to the display of national art collections and associated narratives. However, in an effort to create something resembling a National Gallery, has National Museum Wales ultimately fallen short in achieving wider goals of developing a Welsh narrative through the nation's art holdings? This paper explores how effective the National Museum has been in exploring national narratives through its displays, by focusing on audience engagement with exhibitions. A visitor study, conducted between 2012 and 2014, explored the way in which visitors engaged with works of art that might be classified as being “Welsh.” Following this three year period, it became clear that visitors were not viewing Welsh art work as a viewing priority, and tended to not enter the one exhibition area to present a strong Welsh narrative connected to the display of art. In a context where visitors appear to systematically disengage with a national narrative—a narrative seen to be a priority by Welsh politicians and the museum hierarchy—why is this failure occurring? How might it be confronted? And ultimately does, or should, this emphasis matter in the first place?

Asia in your window frame: museum displays, window curators and Dutch-Asian material culture

This article seeks to analyse the material, architectural and conceptual framing of Asian artefacts in semi-private and public display spaces in the Netherlands. In examining the staging of ‘Buddha heads’ arranged by private ‘window curators’ in Dutch streets and exhibits presented by specialized staff members of representative institutions, the article draws attention to the use of Asian art in the staging of private stories and the grand narrative of the Dutch Golden Age. Through historical cases, recent fieldwork, a visitor study, and museum display analysis, the authors examine the presentation of Asian objects in the conspicuous semi-private settings of Dutch window frames, as well as in the public domain of the museum. The most visited museum of the country, the recently re-opened Rijksmuseum and its Asian Pavilion, provide a particularly significant case study as a ‘window of the nation’, in which Dutch culture and national identity are put on display by means of, and alongside, non-Dutch art, visual and material culture. What do the labels ‘Asian Pavilion’ and ‘Asian Art’ imply, and how can they embody a certain epistemic violence? How do visitors interpret exhibits that are mostly supplied through the private collectors of the Society of the Friends of Asian Art? Taking into consideration the viewpoints of museum visitors, museum curators, (art) historians, and post-colonially informed scholars with an Asian Studies background, the authors shed light on strategies of framing and ‘othering’ within the semi-public spaces of Dutch window frames and the public realm of the national museum.

The Art Affinity Index (AAI)

The interplay of knowledge and art perception has been investigated over the past decades in various disciplines such as art sociology and aesthetic education. We present a brief overview of methodological approaches that investigated the effect of knowledge and expertise on the perception and appreciation of art. We then describe in detail the construction of the empirically grounded Art Affinity Index (AAI), which was formulated using exploratory factor analysis of questionnaire data received from 288 visitors to a fine arts museum in Switzerland. Subsequent confirmatory factor analysis in 289 other visitors showed the reliability and stability of the two AAI factors: Art relation and Art knowledge. The AAI was found to possess satisfactory validity and correlated meaningfully with visitors’ age and gender. These psychometric properties suggest the AAI is a convenient measure of art affinity. It provides a useful instrument for researchers in art sociology, visitor studies, and empirical aesthetics.

Understanding Motivations and Benefits of Attending a Multicultural Festival

This study explores why people attend a multicultural festival and what benefits they perceive they gain from attending such a festival. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with festival visitors of a multicultural festival held in Adelaide, Australia. A multilayered structure of motivation and benefit themes was identified through thematic content analysis of the interview data; differences of motivations and benefits of attending the multicultural festival were found between festival visitors whose self-identified ethnic cultures were represented at the festival and those whose cultures were not featured. The study suggests that multicultural festival visitors gain broad festival experiences that lead to enduring benefits that center around the development of multiculturalism values. This study contributes to the literature in theorizing a context-driven approach in festival visitor studies through exploring context-specific visitor motivations and benefits at multicultural festivals.

Tourism and Pilgrimage: Paying Homage to Literary Heroes

AbstractBy exploring the experiences of visiting the grave of famous authors, this study highlights the place of literary tourism in the tourism pilgrimage literature. It is based on an observational study of visitors to the grave of Jean‐Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris. Analysis reveals that visitors were motivated by a desire for closeness, a wish to pay their respects and to acknowledge the influence on their life of the two writers. The study notes a strong parallel between the religious and the literary pilgrim and contributes to knowledge on the phenomenon of the secular pilgrimage. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Conducting Visitor Studies Using Smartphone-Based Location Sensing

Visitor studies explore human experiences within museums, cultural heritage sites, and other informal learning settings to inform decisions. Smartphones offer novel opportunities for extending the depth and breadth of visitor studies while considerably reducing their cost and their demands on specialist human resources. By enabling the collection of significantly higher volumes of data, they also make possible the application of advanced machine-learning and visualization techniques, potentially leading to the discovery of new patterns and behaviors that cannot be captured by simple descriptive statistics. In this article, we present a principled approach to the use of smartphones for visitor studies, in particular proposing a structured methodology and associated methods that enable its effective use in this context. We discuss specific methodological considerations that have to be addressed for effective data collection, preprocessing, and analysis and identify the limitations in the applicability of these tools using family visits to the London Zoo as a case study. We conclude with a discussion of the wider opportunities afforded by the introduction of smartphones and related technologies and outline the steps toward establishing them as a standard tool for visitor studies.

The Collection and Exhibition of a Fetal and Child Skeletal Series

AbstractDiscussions of repatriation dominate the topic of human remains in museums. For the large portion of remains that are not subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, however, concerns regarding how to curate, exhibit, and interpret them are paramount, especially when the remains are those of children. The contents of anthropological collections often reflect a shared past that may be uncomfortable to address, but was formative and valuable to the discipline. Understanding the motivations and circumstances that contributed to bringing human remains into museums, as well as the changing uses and interpretations of those remains over time, is an are important aspect of collections care and public engagement. This article examines a skeletal series of fetuses and children at the National Museum of Health and Medicine as a case study for uncovering and conveying to museum visitors the complex histories behind the acquisition, curation, and display of juvenile human remains. [Army Medical Museum, National Museum of Health and Medicine, juvenile human remains, exhibition, visitor studies, museum collecting, history of anthropology]

Using One Evaluation to Affect Many

Although visitor studies has gained in popularity in the museum field over the past decade, staff members in many institutions still believe that evaluation is a time-consuming, often complex practice that requires considerable resources and expertise.Over the past few years, evaluation professionals have begun developing innovative methods to streamline practice and increase efficiency with the goal of establishing more opportunities for strategic learning, timely and useful application of data, and building institutional evaluation capacity. As the interest and need for evaluation grows, the field must find ways to respond with agility and share effective strategies with a greater number of institutions engaged in visitor studies. This case study offers such an opportunity as it describes an example of how an institution's small evaluation team leveraged one initiative to affect not only other evaluation studies, but also its own evaluation practice.

Using One Evaluation to Affect Many

Although visitor studies has gained in popularity in the museum field over the past decade, staff members in many institutions still believe that evaluation is a time-consuming, often complex practice that requires considerable resources and expertise.Over the past few years, evaluation professionals have begun developing innovative methods to streamline practice and increase efficiency with the goal of establishing more opportunities for strategic learning, timely and useful application of data, and building institutional evaluation capacity. As the interest and need for evaluation grows, the field must find ways to respond with agility and share effective strategies with a greater number of institutions engaged in visitor studies. This case study offers such an opportunity as it describes an example of how an institution's small evaluation team leveraged one initiative to affect not only other evaluation studies, but also its own evaluation practice.

‘The World Beach Project’ Going Viral: Measuring Online Influence—Case Study of the Victoria and Albert Online Museum Project

This study aims to explore the influence of social media platforms employed by the internationally recognized museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, in the development and implementation of its famous online participatory project—the World Beach Project. The research looks at the behaviour, size and geographic distribution of international audiences present in various social media spaces of the V&A, particularly in relation to the project. The research intends to assess the influence of social media on the global audience by evaluating online audience engagement with the project through quantitative research, behavioural study and qualitative enquiry. The article consists of two major parts. The first section proposes and explains a theoretical model of online influence—understood in this project as international audience’s engagement with and in the social media spaces of the museum. Drawing on traditional museum visitor studies research and emerging methodological approaches utilized in the online world, this part of the article tries to identify and explain the main metric components of the online audience’s engagement. The second part of the article tests this model and provides detailed analysis of the online project explored in this study through its online outreach across different social media platforms.

Evaluation and Social Equity Functioning in Museums

ABSTRACTThis article, adapted from the author's keynote address at the 2014 Visitor Studies Association conference, focuses on two key issues: (a) practical tips for building a culture of evaluative thinking through institutional logic-modeling practices, and (b) museums as agents of social betterment. The author suggests that practitioners in museum visitor studies departments must find creative ways to take the lead in framing structured conversations with their museum colleagues that elevate and seed evaluative thinking into the fabric of organizational culture. I examine how museums, as educational institutions, can consciously and purposefully function as agents of social betterment and not unwittingly design and implement their programs in ways that further legitimate inequality as a normal outcome of an otherwise fair and competitive system.

Segmentation by motivation of Hong Kong Global Geopark visitors in relation to sustainable nature-based tourism

Individuals’ motivations explain visitors’ tourism decisions, and deciphering innate needs is the bedrock to developing strategies for sustainable management in natural protected areas. Established in 2009, the Hong Kong Global Geopark (HKGP) boasts high-order geological landscapes and features that lure both local and overseas tourists. This is a market segmentation study of HKGP visitors’ motivations; 647 respondents rated the strengths of 27 motivations in a questionnaire survey and also recorded their views on various park aspects. Factor analysis identified three main motivation categories relating to nature ambience, heritage, and social and accessibility aspects. Cluster analysis unearthed five visitor clusters. Nature-seeking escapists, heritage enthusiasts, and want-it-alls were the enthusiastic groups, whereas convenience-oriented socializers and passive visitors were less motivated. Stark contrast in acquisition of geological knowledge and site satisfaction were observed between groups. Modification of site (e.g., map display) and interpretative provisions were suggested to enhance visitor experiences and educational benefits. The notion of upkeeping the HKGP’s natural ambience and integrity of geological heritage is emphasized for a sustainable vision of the study area and natural protected areas as a whole. The findings could inform site and visitor management of geoparks and other protected areas and are applicable to other forms of nature-based tourism.

El uso de GPS para el análisis del comportamiento espacio-temporal de los turistas. Pre-test en el Valle de Boí

Este artículo es un análisis exploratorio sobre el uso de los GPS para estudiar el comportamiento de los visitantes en un espacio abierto. El Valle de Boí es un escenario turístico que ofrece diversos recursos de primer orden, por lo que el estudio de los recorridos de los visitantes permite analizar la respuesta a estímulos muy diferentes. Los resultados demuestran que el recurso del GPS en espacios abiertos permite ampliar la información sobre el uso social del espacio turístico y abre las puertas a nuevas formas de análisis.

What is ‘the real thing’ in the museum? An interpretative phenomenological study

This article describes a study of the different ways museum visitors understand their experience of the real thing (TRT) in the museum context. Many professionals and scholars claim that the uniqueness of the museum – in relation to other leisure and educational experiences and offerings – centers on being the keepers of ‘real things.’ Having an insight into the visitor perspectives of what they consider real is important and relevant to museum professionals as well as other cultural heritage workers as it can assist them to better respond to visitor experiences of TRT. The study used an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach to inquire into the qualitatively different ways of understanding the experience of TRT in the museum. The research resulted in four ways of understanding an experience of TRT in museums: through aspects of the self, in relation to others, through the presence of the actual physical thing, and through one's surroundings.