What is it about?

The present study describes a meta-analytic review of museum visitors’ behavior. Although there is a large number of visitor studies available, their cumulative importance has not been determined due to the lack of rigorous methods to determine common causes of visitors’ behaviors. This meta-analytic study permit to compare very diferent exhibitions sizes, shapes and contents.

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Why is it important?

We analyzed Beverly Serrell’s (1998) database of 110 studies, de ning a number of variables that measure visitors’ behaviors in exhibition spaces which exceeded the most typical and obvious ones. We developed four indexes of effect size and obtained their combined estimates: average time per feature ATF, percentage of diligent visitors PDV, inverse of velocity IOV, and stops per feature SPF.

Perspectives

The indexes obtained in this study can be understood as references to be used for comparison with new evaluations. They may help to predict people’s behavior and appreciation of new exhibitions, identifying important problems in museum designs, and providing new research tools for this field.

Mikel Asensio
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Re-Paying Attention to Visitor Behavior: A Re-Analysis using Meta-Analytic Techniques, The Spanish Journal of Psychology, June 2016, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/sjp.2016.39.
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