Visit Motivation as Part of Visitors’ Personal Context in a Science Museum

Abstract

Visit motivation is a multidimensional construct that can be viewed as a convergence of various elements of a visitor’s personal context that lead him or her to visit a particular museum on a particular day. We explored associations between six visit motivation categories, four personal characteristics and three visit-related characteristics that have previously been linked to visit motivation and museum learning. Our main aim was to increase our understanding of how visit motivation is embedded in visitors’ wider personal context. Results showed an effect of visit company on two ‘social’ visit motivation categories, and positive correlations between three different visit motivation categories and visitors’ interest in science, their self-efficacy beliefs, their visit frequency and their visit strategy. Our findings help to better understand how visitors’ personal and visit-related characteristics are associated with their motivation to visit a science museum, which can ultimately support museum professionals in providing customized visit experiences.

Notes

1 We approached all visitors who reached the part of the exhibition where we were positioned. As we were at the very back of a cul-de-sac, there were never too many visitors there.

2 We found no differences between male and female visitors regarding age (t(105) = .467, p = .641, ns) or education (χ^²(4) = 4.09, p = .394, ns).

3 For our translation of German educational levels, we drew on a National Education Panel Study (NEPS) glossary (Research Data Center – Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories, 2019).

4 The questionnaire used in the larger study contained additional variables that are not described here, as they are not relevant to the focus of this paper.

5 When the ANOVAs were first calculated, results showed a very large effect size, which can hint at group differences that were not due to visit company. Further analysis led us to calculate ANCOVAs because of the statistically significant difference in age between the groups.

6 The detailed findings of the ANCOVAs can be found in the appendix.

7 These effect sizes should be interpreted with caution due to a lack of comparable values in museum visit motivation research. For other disciplines, the reporting and interpretation of the partial eta squared as the effect size are disputed, as it could overestimate effects (see e.g. Norouzine & Plonsky, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [LE 1303/8-2-3].

Notes on contributors

Siëlle Phelan

Siëlle Phelan, is a postdoc in the Department of Formal and Informal Learning at the Technical University of Munich. Her research mainly focuses on the role of visitors' personal characteristics when dealing with controversial (science) topics in the museum.

Inga Specht

Inga Specht, Dr. phil., is a research associate at the German Institute for Adult Education-Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning (Research Sector, Department “Teaching, Learning, Counselling”). Her research focuses on docent-led guided tours in museums as well as visitor structure and visitor motivation.

Doris Lewalter

Doris Lewalter, is Professor for Formal and Informal Learning at the Technical University of Munich. Her research focuses, among other things, on educational processes and evaluation in museums.