Introduction: Museums and Their Visitors
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
—Albert Einstein
It’s a cool, rainy Saturday in early November in Baltimore, Maryland. If you are a local resident of Baltimore, what is there to do on such a day when you have relatives visiting from out of town? Not surprisingly, two separate local couples, each with visiting relatives, are converging on one of the major attractions in the area, the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Elmira Harris, her husband, their visiting son, and his wife are in one vehicle and George Johansson, his wife, and his wife’s visiting father are in another. Arriving within a half hour of each other, the two groups follow a similar drill—park, pay their admission, receive a map of the Aquarium, and begin their visit.1
What can we say about the visitor experience of these two individuals, Elmira and George? Even more importantly, what can we predict about what they’ll do at the Aquarium and what meaning they’ll make as a consequence of their visit? Within this brief vignette, I’ve already provided what most museum professionals would currently consider the key pieces of information for answering these questions. To begin with, we know that both individuals visited the same museum, the National Aquarium in Baltimore. We know what the exhibitions at the Aquarium are, what information they contain, and what messages the Aquarium is trying to convey. We know which exhibits are considered the most “attractive” and which are less likely to be seen. For many in the museum community this is all we need to know—visitors come to see the exhibitions, they see the exhibitions, and they leave knowing about the exhibitions. However, years of visitor research has shown that there’s more subtlety to the issue; we need to know something about the visitor and the conditions of visit as well.
We know when the visit happened—the same time of year, same day of the week, and at almost exactly the same time of day. We also know that demographically Elmira and George were fairly similar—both were adults, local residents, infrequent visitors to the Aquarium, and middle class with some college education. The only major demographic differences were that George was white and in his 30s and Elmira was African American and in her mid-50s. In addition to this demographic information, we also know something about their reasons for visiting, which was again almost identical—a rainy day excursion in order to entertain visiting relatives. We even know their social grouping—an all-adult, family group. Given all of these commonalities it should follow that how these two individuals and their groups “use” the Aquarium, the pace of their visit, what they will attend to, and ultimately, even the meanings they make from the experience, would likely be similar. But minutes into the actual visit it becomes apparent that many, if not all, of these assumptions may not be valid.
It takes less than a minute for Elmira and her family to scatter. Elmira goes off in one direction, her husband in another, and her son and his wife in a third direction. Elmira heads straight upstairs towards the top-floor rainforest exhibit. Oblivious to the other visitors there, Elmira thoughtfully wanders around the displays in the rainforest area, reading labels, and carefully seeking out and watching the live creatures clinging to branches and tree trunks which like Elmira, also appear oblivious to visitors. After the rainforest exhibition, Elmira circles back down through the Aquarium against the flow of traffic, and takes in each of the various other parts of the Aquarium. She gives each her undivided attention, and she visits each by herself. Only after about two hours does Elmira rendezvous again with the rest of her family. The four family members gather for coffee in the Aquarium coffee shop and animatedly relate what they’ve seen and discovered.
In contrast, George, his wife, and father-in-law never leave each other’s side. They start at the beginning, at the bottom of the long ramping walkway, and slowly move through the first exhibit. As the visit proceeds, their pace accelerates. When they finally reach the top floor and the rainforest exhibition area, they mutually agree to skip it after glancing at their watches. During their visit, the three of them carry on a reasonably animated conversation, most of it having little relationship to what they are seeing or doing at the time. George’s father-in-law talks about the challenges he had in getting into town, the fact that the cab ride from the airport to their house was so expensive, and how bad the weather and the traffic was. George is then asked by his father-in-law how things are going with his job. Seemingly grateful to get beyond his father-in-law’s travel tirade, George enthusiastically talks about his work. Since he works in biotechnology and investigates how chemicals created by marine organisms can be used in pharmaceuticals, once or twice during the conversation George points to something he sees in one of the exhibits that helps him make a point or relates to the work he does. But after the initial flurry of exhibit-viewing, much of the visit is comprised of the three adults strolling along, chatting, and generally scanning back and forth across the Aquarium’s various exhibits. After about an hour, the three decide they’ve had enough and agree to head over to shops of the Inner Harbor for coffee and something sweet to eat before going back to the house.
Months later when I talked with Elmira and George, their recollections of the museum experience were quite different. Although both were able to share the basic outlines of the experience, which I have described here, the meanings they made from the experience were very different. For George, the Aquarium was a backdrop for his experiences; it was a fun and enjoyable setting in which to fulfill his social obligations for the day. Most of his memories were anecdotes about his father-in-law—some positive and some not so positive; little of what he spontaneously talked about related to the Aquarium exhibits or its creatures. By contrast, Elmira was just bursting with information about what she saw and learned at the Aquarium. Unprompted, she described the toucan, sloth, and iguana she saw, as well as various details from the labels she read. She was quite excited about the prospect of some day being able to travel to the tropics and actually seeing these creatures in the wild (something that is not anywhere on the horizon, but nonetheless still a goal for her). Only with prompting did she talk about her son and daughter-in-law. Clearly, George and Elmira’s experiences, as well as their memories of the experience, were very different from each other despite the apparent similarities at the outset.
What are we to make of these two visitors’ experiences that occurred on this day? How can we make sense of how different they were given the obvious similarities between their two situations? What do we actually know about why people go to museums, what they do there, and what meanings they make from that experience? The National Aquarium in Baltimore as an institution is quite committed to understanding more about the million-plus individuals who visit every year; they are eager to know why they come and what meanings they leave with. And the same is true for all the other zoos and aquariums in the world which collectively have hundreds of millions of visitors each year. In fact, the entire museum community—zoos, aquariums, art, history and natural history museums, children’s museums and science centers, botanical gardens, historical and heritage sites, nature centers and natural parks, and other such institutions—would like to know more about the approximately one billion individuals who visit annually. Despite seeming to possess all the information we needed to understand and predict what the museum visitor experiences of George and Elmira would be like—the nature of the museum, time of day, day of the week, time of year, demographic characteristics of the visitors, social group, and visit motivation—it’s clear these pieces of information were inadequate to the challenge. It seems hard to believe that these huge differences in experience could just be a function of Elmira and George’s different ages and race/ethnicity, though these seemed to be the only major differences between them. Maybe the task of understanding, let alone predicting the museum visitor experience is fundamentally impossible; it is perhaps impossible to make any useful generalizations about museum visitor experiences given how many visitors there are and how obviously unique each individual visitor is. That said, it certainly would be useful if we could!
FROM NICETY TO NECESSITY
Although it was not always true, today most museums exist in order to attract and serve visitors—as many as possible. Although museums have long wondered about who visits their institutions, why and to what end, today they feel economically, socially, and politically compelled to do so. Today’s museum has no choice but to think seriously about who their visitors are and why they come, as well as about who does not visit and why not. Visitors are at the heart of the twenty-first century museum’s existence. Understanding something about museum visitors is not a nicety; it is a necessity! Asking who visits the museum, why and to what end are no longer mere academic questions. These are questions of great importance.
If we knew who visited museums and what meanings they took away from the experience, we would know something about the role that museums play in society. Likewise, we could also learn something about the societal role of museums from knowing more about why other people choose not to visit museums. If we knew something about who visited museums and what meanings they made we would also understand something about the role museums play in individual people’s lives. Buried within the construct we call the museum visitor experience lie answers to fundamental questions about the worth of museums—how museums make a difference within society, how they support the public’s understandings of the world as well as of themselves. These are all tremendously important issues, and these alone would be justification for trying to better understand the museum visitor experience. But there are more practical and pressing reasons the museum profession might have for improving its understanding, and if possible, its prediction of the museum visitor experience.
If we knew the answers to the questions of who goes to museums, what people do once in the museum, and what meanings they make from the experience, we would gain critical insights into how the public derives value and benefits from museum-going (or not, as the case may be) which we could use to improve museums. We live in an increasingly competitive world where every museum is competing for audiences and resources not only against other museums, but against an ever-growing collection of for-profits and non-profits. If museums are to maintain their current popularity and success, they will need to get measurably better at understanding and serving their visitors. Today, museums are among the most successful leisure venues in the world, but it is not a given that museums will always be popular and successful. Even if museums as a category remain popular, it is not assured that any particular museum will continue to be successful. The past decade has been challenging for most museums and the coming decade promises to be even more so. Financial support which was once abundant is now more limited; governments are cutting back and grant support is becoming more challenging to acquire. Individual donations are also becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and it requires ever more effort to maintain even current levels of support. As I write this book in 2008, it seems unlikely that any museum will escape unscathed from the worldwide financial and political turbulence. An enhanced understanding of audience, current and potential, has to be at the heart of any twenty-first century museum’s business model.2 Asking who is the museum’s audience and how can we maximize the quality of the museum visitor experience should be the two questions that every twenty-first century museum should be asking. And not just once, but continuously! So we can see that making sense of museum visitors like Elmira and George and their families, as well as the many others who choose to devote a piece of their precious time to visiting a museum, is an important undertaking. It is also extremely daunting!
WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT THE MUSEUM VISITOR EXPERIENCE
What do we know about our two museum visitors, Elmira and George? Were Elmira and George typical visitors? Could we have predicted that these two individuals and their families would visit the Aquarium on the day in question? What really motivated Elmira to visit? What really motivated George? What would their visit experience be like? What would they look at? What would they think about? What would make them satisfied with their experience? What would they remember? What would they learn? What do we know about the museum visitor experience in general, and based upon what we know, what would we have predicted about the visit experience of people like Elmira and George in particular? These should be fairly straightforward questions and in some ways, they are but in other very profound ways, they are anything but straightforward. As previously shown, our predictions about the museum experiences of Elmira and George based upon the “standard” tools proved to not be very useful. I would argue this is because we currently lack a real model of the museum visitor experience; we know what many of the pieces are, but we lack a comprehensive framework for knowing how all of these various pieces fit together and interact. In this book I intend to show that it is possible to understand the museum visitor experience. It is indeed a quite complex system, but not so complex as to be unknowable. Our inability to more accurately predict the visit experiences of George and Elmira derive not so much from a lack of knowledge about museums and visitors, but because historically we have tended to concretely focus on the pieces of the system, rather than think of the system as a dynamic whole. We have also missed what I believe is the key to the whole system—the important role that personal identity plays in the museum visitor experience.
As with any system, our understanding depends upon the lens through which we look at that system. Currently there are two main lenses that represent the beliefs that museum professionals hold about the nature of museums and their visitors. Both of these lenses reveal some of what’s important about the museum visitor experience. Each yields some insights into why people visit museums, what they do there, and what meanings they make from the experience. However, viewing the museum visitor experience through just one of these lenses, no matter which one is chosen, provides only a partial picture. Not only do they individually not tell the entire story, they do not even tell the entire story collectively. The fact that each lens provides only a partial view of “reality” would in and of itself not be such a problem. The real problem is that many in the field have come to believe and accept that the distorted perspectives provided by these two lenses provide an accurate and useful picture of the museum visitor experience.
Lens #1: It’s all about the Museum—Content and Exhibits
To many in the museum community, the first and most obvious answer to the question of why Elmira and George visited the National Aquarium in Baltimore is that they, or their relatives, must like fish and other marine wildlife. The Aquarium is a place that displays marine organisms such as fish, marine invertebrates, marine mammals, and somewhat uncharacteristically for an aquarium, rainforest wildlife as well.3 Visitors come in order to see these creatures, to see the exhibitions, and to learn more about marine life. Confirming the obvious, the research I did many years ago found that more than 90% of all visitors to art museums said they liked art; more than 90% of all visitors to history museums said they liked history; and more than 90% of all visitors to science museums said they liked science. The other 10% said they weren’t crazy about the subject but they were dragged there by someone who was.4 This is an answer that makes perfect sense to those who work in museums. After all, displaying and interpreting subject-specific content is what museums do best. Of course, not everyone who likes art or history or science or animals visits art or history or science museums or zoos or aquariums! For example, more than 90% of the American public says they find science and technology interesting, but only visit science and technology museums even occasionally, let alone regularly.5 So merely having an affinity for the subject matter only gets you so far in understanding why people visit museums. Let’s refer back to our Aquarium visitors, Elmira and George. Both would probably say they were interested in marine life, George by profession and Elmira by avocation, but neither are regular visitors to the Aquarium. In fact, both stated in my interviews with them that they rarely visited the Aquarium, generally only doing so on occasions like the one described when they had an out-of-town visitor.
Having an interest in the subject matter of the museum is clearly important to determining who will visit, but as our own personal experiences and the examples above would suggest, interest in a subject is not sufficient to explain who visits any given museum, let alone predict who visits on any given day. However, the belief that it is all about the content is so pervasive in the museum world that the vast majority, perhaps as much as 90%, of all marketing and promotion of museums is content-oriented. Media placements of all kinds emphasize what’s on display at the museum or in the traveling exhibits, what rare item can be found in the permanent collections, and what prominent speaker will be part of special programming. All of this marketing is focused on content, and yet such content-focused marketing only slightly influences public visits. Market researchers tell us that most American museum visitors certainly visit because of the content of the museum, but rarely do they say that the content is the single most important factor influencing their decision to visit a museum.6 Research on American museum visitors shows that most are only vaguely aware of what’s on display at the museums they visit. Most say that what is on display at any given time only partially figured into their decision to visit the museum. For example, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, an institution with one of the largest marketing budgets of any museum in America, estimated that only a small percentage of its visitors originally heard about the institution through advertising.7 Nor were the specifics of what was happening at Colonial Williamsburg almost ever the most important factor in influencing them to visit. Similar discoveries have been found to be true at art and natural history museums, science centers, zoos and aquariums, and natural areas.8 For all of these institutions, advertising and publicity programs about the specific content of their institutions accounted for less than 20% of visits.
Would Elmira and George have visited the National Aquarium if it was a museum focused on a content area they or their visitors found uninteresting? Perhaps not, but the motivation for Elmira and George’s visits to the Aquarium on this particular day was probably not primarily motivated by content. Content was important in the sense that it was an interesting place to go, but it was not the major driving factor in influencing these particular individuals to visit on that particular day. As we’ll see, there are individuals for whom the content of the museum is absolutely at the core of what motivates them to visit, but they represent a minority of museum visitors. Museum brochures, advertisements, and promotions do make a difference, but rarely in and of themselves are they the single largest determinant of a visit and rarely will they make someone who never visits a museum into someone who will.
“Well,” says the museum professional, “I may grudgingly acknowledge that content may not be the primary driver of why people come to the museum, but inarguably, content well displayed is what drives a visitor’s museum experience and determines what they learn and remember.” To this I would reply, “Yes, perhaps.” Without question, the exhibitions and objects within the museum represent a major focus of a visitor’s time and attention, but they are not the only things which attract visitors. According to a major study my colleagues and I did many years ago, approximately 60% of a visitor’s attention over the course of a visit was spent looking at exhibits, with the peak amount of content focus occurring in the first 15 minutes of a visit and tapering off considerably by the end of the visit.9 Of course, this means that approximately 40% of the visitor’s attention was directed elsewhere; mostly on conversations with other members of his or her social group or on general observations of the setting. Content does drive much of a visitor’s experience in the museum, but by no means all of it. And of course, the content the visitor chooses to focus on may or may not bear much resemblance to what the museum professionals who designed the experience hoped they’d attend to. This leads to the issue of how much of a visitor’s long-term memories of a museum experience are actually determined by the quality of exhibit design. Research I conducted with my colleague Martin Storksdieck revealed that for some, but not all visitors, what was learned was related to exhibition quality.10 In some cases, visitors who saw more high quality exhibitions (defined as those that clearly and compellingly communicated their intended content) learned more, but in other cases, learning seemed to be independent of whether high- or low-quality exhibits were engaged. At the expense of over-generalizing from the single example presented in this chapter, both George and Elmira were exposed to the same exhibits but came away with very different memories and learning.
Although I’m not aware of any study that has rigorously attempted to define clear percentages of memory that relate to exhibit content, all studies that I know of suggest that content does play a role in visitors’ museum meaning-making; in some cases, it is a large role and in other cases it is a cameo role. For example, in a study Lynn Dierking and I conducted on the memories children had about past school field trips, we found that memory of what someone did and saw, as opposed to, for example, who they were with and what they talked about, tended to dominate across all age groups, regardless of how long ago was the visit.11 Just as in our two examples at the beginning of the chapter, Elmira’s memories were all about the content of the Aquarium while George’s memories only lightly touched upon content. If we had asked both more questions about their visit, we would have revealed more content-related memories. But the message is clear—most visitor experiences are a mix of content-focused and non-content-focused events. Research now reveals that visitors’ long-term memories follow a similar pattern.12
Two corollaries to the It’s all about the Museum lens are: 1) Frequent visitors are those who care about and know the most about the museum’s content; and 2) Visitors who already know something about the content of the museum before visiting will be those who derive the most learning benefit from their museum visit. Museum professionals have variously defined what it means to be a “frequent” visitor, ranging from those who visit three or more times per year to those who visit at least seven or more times per year. No matter the definition, it has often been assumed that frequent visitors are such because of their deep and abiding interest in and knowledge of the subject matter of the institution. Deep interest in the subject matter is no doubt almost certainly characteristic of frequent visitors, but greater knowledge is less likely the case. Although, on average, frequent visitors probably know somewhat more about the museum’s content than first-time visitors (it would be hard for this not to be true since some understanding has to accrue to those who come frequently), there’s no evidence that shows that frequent visitors on average have substantially more knowledge than infrequent visitors. My investigations of visitors have shown that a whole range of reasons prompt individuals to visit frequently, only one of which has to do with the museum’s content. Again, there are frequent visitors who are quite knowledgeable about the museum’s collections and content, but there are just as many who have only a passing knowledge. Like the reasons for visiting in the first place, the relationship between visitors and the content of the museum is not simple and straightforward.
A wide and diverse literature document the vital role that prior knowledge and interest play on learning.13 In fact, specific research by my colleagues and I have shown that both prior interest and prior knowledge are important and vital predictors of what and how much someone learns from a museum experience.14 Although George, based upon his educational background and professional knowledge of marine biology, should have learned more from his Aquarium visit than Elmira, that did not appear to be the case. In general, prior interest and knowledge of the museum’s content strongly correlate with learning, but as demonstrated by our example, this is not always true. The complex reality of the museum visitor experience makes even this important connection only true some of the time. In conclusion, viewing the museum exclusively through the lens of the museum, whether it’s the content or exhibitions and programs, provides a surprisingly small measure of understanding about the museum visitor experience. In large part this is because these variables are passive, they are only made active when they are responded to, interpreted, and processed by visitors. Given how diverse the individuals are who visit museums, it should be no surprise that the responses, interpretations, and resulting mental processing are also diverse.
Lens #2: It’s all about the Visitor—Demographics, Visitor Frequency, and Social Arrangement
Clearly, one cannot understand anything about the museum visitor experience without knowing something about the people who come to the museum. Over the years, many visitor studies have been conducted in order to better understand museum visitors. Although only a fraction of these studies have been published, virtually every museum, from the smallest historic house museum and volunteer-run natural area to the largest art, natural history, zoo, aquarium and science center, have variously counted and in some measure, attempted to describe their visitors. Overwhelmingly, the many efforts to describe museum audiences have framed their efforts using easily quantitative variables. These measures have typically included the demographic categories of age, education, gender and race/ethnicity, but have also included such easily quantifiable variables as time of day, day of the week, and time of year. Museums have also categorized visitors on the basis of their visit frequency—frequent, infrequent, non-visitor, etc., as well as their social arrangement—family, adult, school group, etc. We know much about certain aspects of the museum visitor, in particular the range of standard population characteristics that government agencies and social scientists have traditionally used to describe and categorize the public.
A predictable outcome of segmenting groups into various measurable categories such as demographics is that patterns emerge, but whether those patterns are actually meaningful is another question.15 It is perhaps not surprising that a number of demographic variables have been found to positively correlate with museum-going, including education, income, occupation, race/ethnicity, and age. One fairly consistent finding is that museum-goers are better educated, more affluent, and hold better-paying jobs than the average citizen.16 This is true of visitors to art, history, and science museums as well as visitors to zoos, arboreta, botanical gardens, and national parks. In addition to social class, there are three other demographic variables that appear to also strongly correlate with museum-going—age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Museum-going is not evenly distributed by age. Even limiting the discussion to free-choice visitors, in other words excluding school field trips, elementary school-aged children still represent a significant percentage of all museum-goers. Most children do not come to museums by themselves, they are usually brought by an adult, typically their parents. For many museums, family groups are the largest single category of visitor. Adults between the ages of 25 and 44 and children between the ages of 5 and 12 are disproportionately represented among museum audiences. For example, ten years of demographic studies at the Smithsonian Institution indicated that (excluding school groups) about half of all Smithsonian visitors were between the ages of 20 and 44; 30% were children; 16% were between 45 and 64; and less than 4% were 65 years or older. Visitors to art and history museums tend to be older than this average; visitors to science-oriented museums tend to be younger. In general, museum-going peaks for most adults between the ages of 30 and 50, and then drops off again.
Museum visitors are also not equally distributed across the sexes. Approximately six out of every ten visitors are female and this is true across all kinds of institutions (except war and air and space museums). Beyond age and gender, the other demographic variable that has been intensively studied is race/ethnicity. Considerable attention has been focused in recent years upon whether museums are under-utilized by non-majority populations. In the U.S. particular attention has been focused on African American and more recently, Asian American and Latino populations. Over the last decade or two a large number of studies have documented that African Americans and other minority groups are underrepresented among the American museum-going public.17 In a study I conducted over a decade ago on African American leisure habits, I found that African Americans utilized museums at a rate 20-30% lower than national norms.18 However, extreme caution needs to be used when interpreting these data. Although it appears to be true that as a group, minorities are less likely than the European-American majority to visit American museums, this reality is not as simple as it initially appears. I would assert that it can‘t be assumed, as it usually is, that this fact is somehow related to issues of race/ethnicity.
It is essential to realize that U.S. minority populations (as well as likely those in any other country) are not monolithic. Of the three major minority communities in the U.S.—African Americans, Latino, and Asians—African Americans are probably the most homogeneous despite being anything but homogeneous. For example, a recent epidemiological study in New York City followed up data that African Americans had significantly higher incidences of high blood pressure and heart disease than did European Americans.19 When the situation was studied in detail, however, it was found that the variations in blood pressure and heart disease were greater within the New York City African American population than between blacks and whites living in New York City. Race provided no insights into why the data looked the way it did. My research into the museum-going behavior of African Americans arrived at similar conclusions. The overwhelming conclusion of my research was that, overall, African American leisure behavior was very similar to European American leisure behavior, while tremendous differences existed within and across the African American community. Where black-white differences existed, race/ethnicity did not emerge as the best variable to explain these differences. In fact, one could generalize that it is not just race/ethnicity that provides a poor explanation for museum-going, so too do other demographic variables such as age, income, and education.
By way of illustration, we can look at our chapter case study of Elmira and George—how do they fit these demographic profiles? Elmira works as an oncology nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital and her husband is retired and receives Social Security along with a small pension. By most measures, Elmira and her husband live on a limited income. However, both Elmira and her husband had some college education, but, at least in part due to their race, found it challenging to secure high-paying jobs. (Race/ethnicity does make a significant difference in some circumstances, but twenty-first century U.S. museum-going doesn’t appear to be one of them.) In contrast, George and his wife are both professionals and together earn a good income. If we were going to use only demographics, we might predict that George and his wife are more likely to be museum-goers than are Elmira and her husband. In other words, Elmira does not appear to be a likely candidate to be a museum-goer. By contrast, George, except for the slight negative influence of his gender, appears to be the perfect candidate—white, well-educated, affluent, and of the right age. However, it turns out that Elmira is a frequent art museum visitor while George rarely visits museums of any kind. Although these examples do not prove that demographic variables are not useful, they do make the point that these quantitative measures are a very blunt instrument for understanding the museum visitor experience.
Although almost every museum has attempted to count and sort their visitors based upon demographic categories—age, gender, race/ethnicity, income, education, and occupation—these categories yield a false sense of explanation. We think we know our visitors, but I would argue that we do not. As summarized above, we think we “know” that museum visitors as a group are better educated, older, and wealthier than the public as a whole, and also white and female, but what does this actually mean? Although these statistics are on average true, museum visitors are not averages, they are individuals. This demographic data provides insufficient information to predict whether or not people will visit a museum. Likewise, knowing that someone is less educated, younger, and poorer than the public as a whole, and also brown and male, provides insufficient information to predict that these individuals will not visit a museum. After all, on at least one particular Saturday in November, both Elmira and George showed up at the National Aquarium, only one of whom, based upon demographics, might have been expected to visit. Knowing that Elmira was older and African American did not predict that she would not visit the National Aquarium any more than knowing that she had some college education and was female predicted that she would. Knowing a museum-goer’s age, gender, race/ethnicity, income, education, and occupation does not now, nor will it ever tell anyone why someone does or does not visit a specific museum; it won’t even reveal if they will ever visit any museum. The major conclusion I reached after studying hundreds of visitors, both black and white, for my major investigation of African American museum-going was that museum-going is far too complex to be understood only on the basis of easily measured variables such as demographics.20 And this also includes the latest demographic-based trend which is to segment visitors generationally—Mature/Silents, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y.21 These categories just don’t provide sufficient information to be really useful; generational stereotypes yield just that, stereotypes.
The reason measures like demographics yield only the most limited insights into who visits museums is because they are fundamentally unrelated to museums. Variables like age, gender, race/ethnicity, and generation do tell something about individuals but they tell virtually nothing about how these individuals might relate to museums. For a personal context variable to be useful, it needs to have some relationship to the other contexts such as the subject matter of a museum and the design of its exhibitions. Knowing that someone is male, in their late 50s, white and well-educated, or that they arrived at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday afternoon, does not provide much information as to what someone will actually attend to while in the museum. Nor does it provide a clue as to what they will remember from the experience as meaningful because this type of data is divorced from the specific realities of the museum. (Unless it was a museum devoted to telling the story of 50-year-old, white, well-educated males with a propensity to visit museums on later week-day afternoons! Then this data would be highly pertinent information.) At one point, social scientists, including and particularly marketing researchers, became enamored with these variables. It was thought that they provided deep insights, but we should now know that this is not true. These kinds of variables unquestionably describe some characteristics of visitors and they can be “objectively” and easily measured, but what of value they tell us is another matter. After many years of effort, the jury is in—the payoff in understanding of the museum visitor experience is remarkably small. As business consultant Anthony Ulwick observed with regard to segmenting retail consumers using traditional demographic categories, businesses often use “convenient classification schemes and impose it [sic] on customers with the hope and expectation that customers will act according to the dictates of the categories the scheme outlines … unfortunately, that hope is simply not justified when companies use traditional approaches.”22 Demographic descriptions of museum visitors do sometimes reveal interesting patterns, but interesting patterns are not the same as useful patterns. Quantitative measures such as demographics provide too little information about visitors in relation to museums to be useful variables for describing and understanding the museum visitor experience.
Demographic variables are not the only easily measured variables that museums have applied to visitor populations. Two other variables that have been commonly used are visit frequency and social arrangement. Unlike demographics, these variables are directly related to key aspects of the museum itself and thus, have been much more valuable in understanding the museum visitor experience. However, since these variables capture only some of the relevant information we need to understand the museum visitor experience, when museums unduly focus on them, misunderstandings can arise.
Let’s examine, for example, visit frequency. Certainly the group of individuals who regularly visit the museum must somehow have some attributes that distinguish them from those who visit only infrequently or never. The question is what, other than visit frequency, are these attributes? The problem arises when we treat visit frequency as a category of visitor, implicitly assuming in the process that all frequent visitors are the same, that all infrequent visitors are the same, as are all non-visitors. Visit frequency is not a quality of the visitor; it is an action of the visitor that is indicative of some deeper attribute that is important. The actual number of visits is just an indicator of this underlying quality. If we can understand that underlying quality, we will have something useful. Again, just because visit frequency is relatively easy to measure doesn’t necessarily make it worth measuring!
A similar situation has been the increasing appreciation among museum professionals of the importance of attending to the visitor’s social arrangement. Virtually all visitors arrive at the museum as part of a social group.23 Not surprisingly then, making sense of museum visitors should require taking into consideration visitors’ social arrangements. This not only makes good sense, it is almost certainly true. As cited earlier in this chapter, much of the in-museum experiences of visitors and many of their resulting long-term memories of that experience involve social events. So clearly, the social nature of the visit is extremely important.
What arises as problematic though is the leap from the fact that social interaction is important to the assumption that a key factor for visitors must be how they are socially arranged. For example, it is now widely assumed that family groups (a family being typically defined as a group containing at least one adult and a relatively small number of children; relatedness is presumed but is not necessarily the case) behave differently than all-adult groups and that pairs of adults behave differently than larger groups of adults. Beyond the realities, such as being with other people engenders different behaviors than being alone and being an adult responsible for children in a public setting carries with it certain requirements and constraints that being an adult without children in the same setting does not, exactly how much influence social arrangement has on visitors is open to question. Much like visit frequency, a visitor’s social arrangement is likely emblematic of deeper influences that do directly affect the museum visitor experience. However, social arrangement only correlates with these deeper influences, they are not in and of themselves predictive. While family groups overall appear to behave differently than do all-adult groups, the reasons they do so are not necessarily directly tied to their social arrangement. As discovered in the results of my study of African American museum visitors, the variability within family groups may well be greater than the variability between family and all-adult groups.
Thus, knowing that an adult came to the museum with a child provides only a limited predictive ability for how that adult will describe the meaning they constructed from their visit. We do know that visitors’ recollections of their museum experiences are almost always influenced by the social interactions they had with the other members of their social group. However, the nature and direction of that influence can be highly variable. For example, in describing their museum visitor experiences, some parents will dwell almost totally on their children’s experiences, others almost totally on their own experiences. Knowing only that the visitor was part of a family group (or part of an all-adult group) provides insufficient information to predict the types of memories. For example, George and Elmira arrived at the Aquarium in identical social groupings, but their museum experiences and their post-visit recollections were strikingly dissimilar. Thinking about visitors exclusively through the lens of social arrangement yields some useful insights about how visitors might behave within the museum, but ultimately these insights are too broad and unpredictable to be useful in understanding the museum visitor experience.
TOWARDS A NEW MODEL OF THE MUSEUM VISITOR EXPERIENCE
The museum visitor experience cannot be adequately described by analyzing the content of museums, the design of exhibitions, through easily quantified visitor measures such as demographics, or even by analyzing visit frequency, or the social arrangements in which people enter the museum. To get the complete answer to the questions of why people visit museums, what they do there, and what learning/meaning they derive from the experience, requires a deeper, more holistic explanation. Despite the considerable time and effort that museum investigators have devoted to framing the museum visitor experience using these common lenses, the results have been depressingly limited. These perspectives have yielded only the most rudimentary descriptive understandings and none approach providing a truly predictive model of the museum visitor experience.
The Contextual Model of Learning, which some have claimed should now be considered a standard in the field,24 provides a way to organize the complexity of what people do within a museum by describing the visitor experience as a set of interacting, contextually relevant factors. However, the Contextual Model of Learning is not really a model in the truest sense, it is actually a framework and a descriptive tool. A true museum visitor experience model would be prescriptive and yield not only descriptions, but actual predictions about what museum visitors will do and learn. I would suggest that the lack of a real, predictive model of the museum visitor experience has prevented us from moving beyond the often linear and concrete view of this complex and abstract phenomenon. We have historically over-focused on either the museum side or visitor side of the equation while neglecting the interaction or the unification of the visitor and the museum into a single unique experience. We have also been guilty of unduly limiting the temporal and spatial perspectives of the museum visitor experience. As I have long argued, it is fundamentally impossible to understand the museum visitor experience by only viewing it from within the “box” of the museum.25 Understanding the museum visitor experience requires panning the camera back in time and space and appreciating that the actual time spent in the museum comprises only a small fraction of what is needed for understanding that experience. For most people, museum-going is just a small slice of daily life, just one of many experiences in a lifetime filled with experiences. Accordingly, we need to try and understand the museum visitor experience within this larger context. If we are to answer our fundamental questions of why people visit museums, what they do there, and what meaning they make of the experience, we must see the museum visitor experience as a series of nested, seemingly interrelated events. In reality, the museum visitor experience is no more than a series of snapshots of life, artificially bounded by our own need to frame what happens in the museum as not only important but separate. However, for the public that visits museums these experiences are often neither readily delineated nor seen as singular events.
Thus, I would assert that the museum visitor experience is neither about visitors nor about museums and exhibitions, but rather it is situated within that unique and ephemeral moment when both of these realities become one and the same—visitors are the museum and the museum is the visitor. This new way of thinking suggests that we stop thinking about museum exhibitions and content as fixed and stable entities designed to achieve singular outcomes and instead, think of them as intellectual resources capable of being experienced and used in different ways for multiple, and equally valid purposes. It requires us to stop thinking about visitors as definable by some permanent quality or attribute such as age or race/ethnicity. Instead, we need to appreciate that every visitor is a unique individual, and each is capable of having a wide range of very different kinds of visitor experiences (even though currently most visitors only select from a very limited palette of possible experiences). Finally, it demands that we come to accept that the long-term meanings created by visitors from their time in the museum are largely shaped by short-term personal, identity-related needs and interests rather than by the goals and intentions of the museum’s staff.
The result of this new thinking is a model of the museum visitor experience framed around what I call the visitor’s identity-related visit motivations—the series of specific reasons that visitors use to justify as well as organize their visit, and ultimately use in order to make sense of their museum experience. Visitors’ identity-related motivations emerge as important because they provide a window into this complex system, a way to reframe the museum visitor experience so that it simultaneously captures important and key realities of the visitor, as well as significant and critical realities of the museum. It is not just about the visitor nor is it just about the museum; it is about how these two realities come together as one. Let me state explicitly that what I’m proposing is not just a way to repackage what we’ve always said and done. I believe that what I’m proposing represents a fundamental shift in how we frame our thinking about the museum visitor experience. In this new typology, neither the visitor nor the museum and its exhibitions are immutable and fixed; each are fluid and changing—the same individual can engage with the same exhibitions and content in fundamentally different ways depending upon their current identity-related visit motivations. To be useful, I’ve attempted to simplify this complexity into a manageable package, one that meaningfully and validly connects all of the personal, social, and physical realities of the museum visitor experience. To this end, I’ve strived in this book to embody the quote by Albert Einstein at the beginning of this chapter, the creation of a model that is as simple as possible, but not too simple.
The essence of the model is that each museum visit experience is the synthesis of the individual’s identity-related needs and interests and the views of the individual and society of how the museum can satisfy those needs and interests. The tangible evidence of the confluence of these perceptions is the visitor’s identity-related visit motivations. These visit motivations create a basic trajectory for the individual’s museum visitor experience. That trajectory is influenced, while in the museum, by the factors outlined in the Contextual Model of Learning. Coming out of the visit, the individual uses his or her museum visit experience to enhance and change his or her sense of identity and perceptions of the museum, as well as, in a small but significant way, how society perceives this and other museums.
Over the next several chapters I will explain the details of this model. I will begin by describing what it is about these places called museums that makes them so attractive to the public and entices large numbers of people to visit them—in psychology-speak, “what benefits museums afford the visiting public.” Then, I will shift to a discussion of individual identity—a construct which I believe helps us understand when and how the needs of the individual become congruent with what a visit to a museum affords. Finally, and most importantly, I will describe how this model can help us understand what happens at the intersection of these two worlds—the place where the identity-related needs of the visitor merges with the affordances of the museum and results in museum visit experiences, visitor satisfaction, and memories, all of which set the stage for future museum visitor experiences.
This new model of the museum visitor experience, framed through the new lens of visitor identity-related motivations, allows us to begin to make sense out of the many museum visits that happen each year by people such as Elmira and George. This model helps us understand these visits not only retrospectively, but potentially prospectively as well. What I will describe is not only a descriptive framework but a predictive model that we can use to anticipate who will visit a museum, what visitors will do within the museum, and even what long-term meanings they will make of their experiences long after the visit. Presumably, if museum professionals possessed such a model they could use it to influence and ideally, enhance museum practice. In the second section of this book, I will offer some initial suggestions on how the model might be applied to this task. But first, we need to begin to better understand this model. To do that we need to view the museum from the only vantage point that makes sense, the view that the broader public has of the museum. I am not interested in an esoteric philosophical analysis, a la the French sociologist Bourdieu, of the socio-political role of museums in society and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of museum’s sources of power and authority.26 Rather, my goal is much more practical—I am interested in answering the question of why would someone make the decision to visit a museum, particularly as most people do, during their precious leisure time? From an early twenty-first century perspective, what then are the attributes of museums that the public perceives that makes them such popular leisure destinations?