Examining the Effect of Visitor Motivation on Observed Visit Strategies Using Mobile Computer Technologies

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interaction between visitor motivation and in-museum visitor behavior. The authors postulate that, in order to understand this aspect of the dynamics of museum visiting, we need to view the motivations to visit the museum as lists compiled by individual visitors but also as part of wider lists of reasons for visiting that exist in society—which they refer to as cultural itineraries. Self-report methods have been used to capture patterns of motivation that emerge across the data, which in this case were used to examine their relation to visit strategies as manifested by visitor pathways through the London Zoo. Visitor pathways were captured through the novel use of mobile location-sensing technology which offers distinct opportunities in this context that have been unexplored in audience research. The combination of standard research methodology and automated location tracking used in this study allowed us to indentify two distinct visit strategies that directly relate to social groupings with different motivations: (a) groups with an education/participation motivation, who visit exhibits only, and (b) groups with a social event motivation, who spend a considerable amount of time on nonexhibit related activities and socializing with other family members and friends.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank our Research Assistant, Effrosyni Nomikou, who collected the data and did part of the initial analysis of the PMMs. A big thank you to our colleagues, Malcolm Whitehead and Phil Holmes, who were based at London Zoo at the time this research was carried out. Our thanks also go to Catherine Charles for editing earlier versions of this article.

Notes

In all but one (Falk et al., 1998) of the studies we have conducted, information on visitor motivation is collected as part of an open-ended interview in which visitors are encouraged to express their motivation in their own terms and while they respond to a series of questions not necessarily related to the purpose of their visit.

Biophilia is the term used by Edward O. Wilson (1984) to describe what he believed is our innate affinity for the natural world in his book, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species.

Although it is possible to use many different consumer devices currently widely available, in this study we opted to provide the same smart-phone model to all participants. In this way, we were able to eliminate any possible variations in the recorded data resulting from the different capabilities of different models. The specific model used was the Openmoko Neo (www.openmoko.org), which at the time provided superior programmability and extensibility, which greatly facilitated the study. We expect that in the future similar studies will be carried out using a variety of smart phones carried by the visitors themselves.

The term displacement is used here in its mathematical sense referring to the shortest distance between two consecutive location measurements.

The numbers in the parenthesis refer to the number of times each motivation was mentioned.

Trail representations were calculated using the custom software described in Papadogkonas et al. (2006) and maps of the London Zoo annotated by hand to demarcate the boundaries of specific areas and exhibits using the open-source QGIS system (Sherman & Mitchell, 2012).