Visiting heritage museums with children: Chinese parents’ motivations

ABSTRACT

Museums have been widely considered as informal educational sites. Studies about families in museums heavily concentrate on the cognitive aspects and the learning outcomes in science museums and art galleries. Compared with previous research, this study emphasizes four distinctive themes: a focus on the pre-trip stage of the museum visit, museums depicting local heritage, a Chinese context, and attention to social and cultural issues. In detail, this study explores the motivations of Chinese parents who take their children to a cluster of heritage museums at the southern end of China’s Grand Canal, a newly designated world heritage site in Hangzhou. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with parents visiting the museums with their children. It was found that the key push factors include education and learning, relaxation, creating positive experience for children, relationship enhancement (quality time with children) and extended family obligations. Free admission, the innovative displays, the opportunities for personal interaction and the quality of the environment both within and surrounding the museums were important pull factors. The family market, particularly the extended family, may be particularly important in China given their importance in Chinese culture based on Confucian teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• Chinese parents
• children
• motivations
• culture

Acknowledgements

Appreciation is extended to Prof. Philip L. Pearce from James Cook University, Australia and Prof. Huanzhou Zhang from Zhejiang International Studies University for their insightful comments at the early stage of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mao-Ying Wu, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Tourism at School of Management, Zhejiang University, China. She is interested in the well-being of tourism communities, tourists in emerging markets and tourist–host interaction in cross-cultural contexts.

Geoffrey Wall, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Waterloo, Canada. He is active in research and is involved in a number of international projects in Asia, particularly mainland China and Taiwan.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (number 13BSH044).