![Sample our Tourism, Hospitality and Events journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5950/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Tourism-Hospitality-Events.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
As museums continue to broaden their offers and attract increasingly diverse audiences, it becomes ever more important to understand how motivations for visitation can vary between different cultural groups. This article explores some of the reasons people visit cultural festivals at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, combining data from 5 different festivals with a total sample of 414. The audience of these festivals contains a mix of 74% cultural community members and 26% non-community members, and their reasons for visiting the festivals differ in distinct ways. Among these distinctions, it was found that social identity played a role in why people chose to visit, especially for community members and at the festivals of communities that were relatively new to Melbourne.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to museum volunteer Mirka Odlevakova for sparking interest in this line of research, and to the public programs team at the Immigration Museum for creating such wonderful festivals.
Notes
1The Irish Festival also included the following three options: learn about Irish history, learn about Irish culture, and/or learn about the Irish community in Ireland. These options were discontinued for the rest of the festival surveys as the questions were thought to overlap too closely.