Year: 2020
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: People visit museums with differing motivations. We use Falk’s visitor identity model to examine visitors’ motivation to visit an art museum. We assess (1) the prevalence of different motivation types; (2) how visit motivations and outcomes relate to visit satisfaction and length; and (3) the relation between visit motivations and fulfillment of expectations. We found that (1) visitors most strongly endorsed motivations and visit outcomes related to exploration and least strongly to facilitating another’s visit; (2) visit outcomes predicted visit satisfaction and length more strongly than did visit motivations; and (3) visit outcomes largely met or exceeded the visitors’ pre-visit expectations. The present findings suggest that outcomes of the visit matter more than motivations for visiting. We suggest that examining the entirety of a visit—pre-visit motivation and post-visit outcomes—may provide new insights about art museum visits that may be obscured when focusing on one of these aspects.
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4247011015