Visit motivations: development of a short scale for comparison across sites

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Visit motivation
• educational leisure setting
• scale development
• museum
• zoo
• visitor studies

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank John Falk and Jan Packer for providing us with their instruments and the necessary background information. We also want to thank Sarah Reinhold for her assistance with data collection and preparation, Karl Hughes for assisting us with the item translations, and Inga Specht for the initial idea to include visit motivation in our studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our paper deliberately focuses on educational leisure settings, thereby excluding motivations for visiting sites such as amusement parks or sports events for example.

2. The original text was in German.

3. Questionnaires were consistently adjusted for each site, e.g., by substituting ‘museum’ for ‘zoo’.

4. The initial solution with all items is available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation under grant number SPP1409 - LE 1303/8-3.