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Published: March 1999.
A Survey of Characteristics and Patterns of Behavior in Visitors to a Museum Web Site
John Chadwick, Ed.D., Institute for Learning Innovation, USA and Patricia Boverie, Ph.D., University of New Mexico, USA
Introduction
As the growth of the World Wide Web changes how people access information and spend their leisure time, museum professionals need to learn about their new audience coming through the electronic doors just as they attempt to learn and meet the needs of those who walk through the physical doors of the museum. Most of the literature in this area is of a philosophical nature. There are no empirically based studies on the nature of the Web as an informal learning environment and the similarities or differences between the different types of visitors.At the closing plenary session of the 1998 Museums and the Web conference, Greg Van Alystyne from the Museum of Modern Art called an online a museum a parallel museum. The results from this study support the notion that some of the behaviors observed at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History Web site seem to parallel some of the behaviors other researchers observe in museums.
Again, during the 1998 Museums and the Web conference, attention has been focused on answering the questions of who is using museum Web sites, why are people using museum Web sites, and what are the behaviors and characteristics of the online visitors. Following the conference Lynn Dierking (personal communication, April 28, 1998) wrote:
We need to understand the relationship between web site users and museums visitors. Are they the same people or do they at least share similar values and expectations for how they want to spend free time? There is some sense from preliminary data that they do share some characteristics such as high interest in the topic they are pursuing and a desire to get more in-depth information but more studies are needed.According to Falk and Dierking (1998) individual interest is one of the major factors that influence a visit to a museum. "Personal history and values play a major role in museum-going as well. On the whole, individuals who go to museums have explicitly chosen to attend not because of some theoretical interest in learning, but out of a concrete interest in a particular area or areas of learning, whether science, history or art" (CD-ROM). To further complicate matters when dealing with individual differences and hypermedia in museums, Falk and Dierking (1998) contend that the use of multimedia in a museum setting is highly self-selected. However, "It is important to note, of course, that in each of these studies there were also a number of visitors that spent a great deal of quality time interacting with the media elements. These results support the notion that media is an important option for some visitors."
This research project is a first attempt to answer questions being asked by museum professionals - who is visiting a museum Web site, why people are visiting a museum Web site, and what do the online visitors do when they come to a museum Web site.
Social context plays a major role in how visitors experience a museum, and individuals may have a different experience than those visiting as part of group. (Falk and Dierking, 1992). Much has been written about how families and groups learn in a variety of situations, including museums. It is beyond the scope of this study to go beyond a very basic understanding of how families learn in informal learning environments such as museums. However, a basic understanding may explain some of what was uncovered in this study about families using the Museum's Web site. According to Hilke, "Scholars agree that a major function of the family is to support learning among its members. Whether called childrearing, socialization, acculturation, or education, the process of raising and nurturing children involves the transfer of information between all family members" (1989, p.103).
According to Roger Wulff (Wulff, 20/08/1998) "I attended a "Non-Profits On-Line" Conference in Jan. of this year and was amazed to learn what some non-profits are doing with their web sites - and how important the web is becoming in the lives of the average family. Newspaper readership is declining, even TV viewing by the average family is declining - where use of the Internet will double, maybe triple, by the year 2000. This is the reason a newspaper empire like The Washington Post (one of the major sponsors of that Conference) is entering the Internet business."
One would expect differences in behavior between individuals and groups visiting a Web site, just as one would expect differences between the two groups in the physical museum. How families and other groups are visiting museum Web sites and their experiences are worthy of further research.
One of the most important findings from this research is that groups, which accounted for approximately 30% of the respondents, accessed more files than individuals in the same period of time. Some of the behaviors that take place in a museum can be observed in those accessing a museum Web site. Even with the findings in this study, there is room for more research into the behaviors of people who use the Web as an informal learning environment. Recruiting participants via the Internet brings a self-selected population and a sample that is drawn using non-probabilistic methods. The population that participates in this survey may not be representative of the population that uses the Internet or the Museum Web site (Chadwick, 1997). This self-selected sample, combined with self-rating of knowledge, interest, and experience, also makes generalizability difficult. It is impossible to know if the sample in this study is representative of the visitors to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Web site. This is going to be a problem for anyone conducting online surveys to learn about online visitors. However, when the population of interest are visitors to a Web site and the study is focused on visitor behavior, then one must accept these limitations.
For this research project a series of five research questions and associated hypotheses were developed to look at the individual differences of visitors to a museum Web site. The research questions were:
- Are museum Web site visitors also museum visitors?
- Will the reasons for individuals visiting a museum Web site affect how they access the site?
- Will I find a difference between groups (museum visitors and hypermedia users) in why they access the Web site and in how they access the Web site?
- Does subject matter knowledge influence the way a person accesses a museum Web site?
- Do the characteristics of the online visitor predict their visitation paths?
Methods
Subjects
The average age of the respondents was 41.08 with a wide variance that would be expected from a heterogeneous group and sample (Table 1). This was not too different from the most recent GVU study of overall Internet usage where the average age was 35.70 (Pitkow and Kehoe, 1997, online).Table 1. The Age Range of Survey Respondents
| Mean | Std. Dev | Variance | Range | Minimum | Maximum |
| 41.08 | 14.05 | 197.33 | 74.00 | 6 | 80 |
More men (62.10%) than women (37.90%) completed this survey. Once again, the results are consistent with the findings of the 1997 GVU survey where 38.50% of the respondents in that survey were female. (Pitkow and Kehoe, 1997b, online)
Procedures
A single survey with 19 items was used for this study (Appendix A). This survey includes some basic demographic questions as well as a combination of open-ended questions, categorical questions, and five-point Likert-scale items. The purpose of the questionnaire was to determine if the people using the Web site are also museum visitors. Also, the survey gathered data about prior knowledge and interest in the subject matter of the Web site. Data was collected online and stored in a file on the Web server located at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. The survey was conducted from December 3, 1997 to February 8, 1998 at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Web site. A total of 348 respondents completed an online survey that was an adaptation of a previously used museum visitor study to determine why people choose to spend leisure time at a museum.The survey used for this study is an adaptation of a survey conducted by Marilyn Hood that looked at why people did or did not choose to spend their leisure time at a museum (Hood, 1981). The survey by Marilyn Hood had been used to assess both museum visitor and non-visitor behavior and attitudes and had a track record as a reliable and valid instrument in its original form. The survey used in this study included a combination of continuous variables, ranking, and Likert-scale questions.
Results
There were several important findings in this study, but the focus of this paper is on what was learned about group behavior when visiting the Web site. Much of the research in how people use computers has focused on computer use in education as a solitary activity (Stone and Hutson, 1984), although it is not unusual for groups to use a computer in a museum setting (Chadwick, 1992) (Diamond, Bond, and Hirumi, 1989).The majority of people visiting the Web site were visiting alone (69.80%). Respondents who indicated they were visiting as part of a family group account for 21.60% of the responses to the question. The frequency of the responses are summarized in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The number of answers, per category, to the survey question, "With whom are you visiting this Web site?"Of those who visited as part of some sort of group, 41 respondents indicated that there were two people in the group while 22 respondents indicated that there were three people in the group, as shown in Figure 2. This question may have posed some problems for respondents, since one person indicated that there were no other people in their group and two people indicated that there was one person in their group. It is unclear if the count is the total number of people in the group, or if the count is the number of people other than the primary user.
Figure 2. The number of responses to the question of how many people were in a group.An ANOVA was performed with two levels of an independent variable. One level were people visiting the web site alone and the second level were people visiting the Web site as part of a group. The total number of files accessed (hits) was the dependent variable. Those who were visiting as part of a group accessed more files than those visiting alone. The results of this ANOVA were statistically significant F(1,348) = 11.3076, MSe = 344, p < .05 as shown in Table 2.
| Source | D.F. | Sum of Squares | Mean Squares | F Ratio | F Prob. |
| Between Groups | 1 | 777.01 | 777.01 | 11.31 | .0009 |
| Within Groups | 343 | 23569.58 | 68.72 | ||
| Total | 344 | 24346.59 |
Groups were likely to visit more pages during an online visit than individuals during roughly the same amount of time. There was not a statistically significant difference between groups and individuals in the time spent visiting the Web site. Individuals spent an average of 20.78 minutes visiting the Web site compared to 23.49 minutes for groups.
While both individuals and groups are ready to learn when they visit a museum Web site, those visiting as part of a group are much more likely to say they are visiting to learn something rather than just engaging in some browsing activity. When asked why they were visiting, groups indicated they were visiting to learn something, and a very low percentage (8.70%) of those visiting as part of a group indicated they were visiting to browse through the Web site. Those visiting the Web site alone also indicated they were visiting to learn something, but a higher percentage said they were visiting to browse (18.10%). This is illustrated in Table 3. Although the differences were not statistically significant, it is interesting note the differences between
Table 3. What is Your Main Purpose for Visiting the Web Site Today? Comparison Between Individuals and Groups
|
Count Row Pct Col Pct Tot Pct |
Alone | Any type of group |
Row Total |
| Browse |
44 83.00% 18.10% 12.7% |
9 17.00% 8.70% 2.6% |
53 15.30% |
| Learn |
178 66.20% 73.30% 51.30% |
91 33.80% 87.50% 26.20% |
269 77.50% |
| Other |
20 87.00% 8.20% 5.80% |
3 13.00% 2.90% .90% |
23 6.60% |
| None |
1 50.00% .40% .30% |
1 50.00% 1.00% .30% |
2 .60% |
|
Column Total |
243 70.00% |
104 30.00% |
347 100.00% |
why groups said they were visiting and why individuals said they were visiting the same Web site.
Discussion
Perhaps, given the growth of the Internet, it is not all that unreasonable to see a growing number of groups using the Web. Nearly 30% of the respondents in this survey indicated that they were visiting as some sort of group. Individuals and groups visiting a museum generally have different agendas and reasons for visiting a museum. Individuals and groups also display different behaviors while visiting a museum. These differences seem to be mirrored on the Web as individuals engage in more directed searches and groups engage in more browsing behaviors at a museum. In this study it turned out that there was a statistically significant difference between individuals and groups in the number of files accessed although there was not a significant difference in the amount of time individuals and groups spent visiting the Web site, which would indicate that groups are exhibiting more browsing behaviors than individuals. This is a phenomenon that has been observed in museums (Falk and Dierking, 1992).While most museum visitors come as part of a social group (Falk and Dierking, 1992), only about 30% of the respondents in this study indicated that they were part of a social group. According to Falk and Dierking, in speaking about adult visitors who visit museums alone, "They may visit a museum between four and forty times in a year. Their agendas are honed by direct personal experience and knowledge. Because these visitors are so well informed, their expectations are closely tied to the actual offerings of the museum. An effective 'feedback loop' has been created by recurrent visits" (p. 37). This feedback loop may explain why frequent museum visitors and experienced hypermedia users rated themselves higher on knowledge of the subject than occasional museum visitors and inexperienced museum visitors.
This study has suggested certain differences between groups and individuals visiting a museum. As reported in the results section, groups may say they are arriving for a specific reason, such as to learn something, but their behavior would seem to indicate that they are engaged in browsing behaviors, much more than those visiting the Web site alone. Groups tend to access more HTML pages and access more files in the same amount of time as those visiting alone. This is an important area for future research. We know that museums are social settings and groups influence how people behave in a museum. More needs to be learned about how groups learn using the Internet. A future study may want to explore this issue further.
Research on visitor behavior in museums (Falk and Dierking, 1992) suggest that the type of group influences behavior in a museum. Children visiting as part of class may behave differently than families with children visiting a museum. Adults behave differently than adults with children. An effective way to explore the group dynamics involved in museum Web site visitation would make an important contribution to the field of visitor studies.
Another area of research could be in the gender gap. More men than women took the time to complete this survey, and the results are consistent with other online studies. Is there really a large gap in the number men and women using the Internet, or are men only more likely than women to complete an online survey?
Of particular concern to researchers trying to understand Web site visitation are the problems associated with a self-selected sample and a proportionately low response rate when compared to the overall number of visitors. A recent online survey conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration offered a free photo from the Hubble Space Telescope to be sent via U.S. mail as a reward. More than 70% of the visitors to the NASA site completed the survey (Kiernan, 1998, online).
To generalize to museum Web sites, online visitors arrive at the Web site ready to learn. This presents a great opportunity for museums to present information about their museum, knowledge about their collections, and artifacts in a new medium and to a new audience who is ready to learn.
Appendix A
Online Survey
Online Audience Survey
The results from this survey will be used as part of a doctoral dissertation being conducted by John Chadwick at the University of New Mexico to help gain a better understanding of who uses museum Web sites. The results of this survey will also help the staff at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science make improvements to this site. If you would like a copy of the full informed consent letter as required by the University of New Mexico Institutional Review Board, you may view the page and either use the print command on your Web browser to print a copy or use the mail command to e-mail a copy to yourself. [Informed Consent Letter]By starting the survey you are giving your consent for the information collected to be used for this doctoral dissertation and by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. You may quit at anytime, however partial surveys will not be used.
1. Is this your first visit to this Web site? Yes____ No____
2. If No, about how many times have you been here in the past 12 months? ________
3. What is your main purpose for visiting this Web site? You may select up to three items.
___ To pass time4. Are you visiting this Web site:___ To see a particular section of this Web site. (please specify): _____________
___ To browse generally through this Web site.
___ To seek entertainment
___ To learn something
___ Planning a tour of the museum or Albuquerque
___ To show this Web site to your children
___ To share the experience with other persons.
___ Research
___ Class project
___ Other (please specify): ______________
____ Alone5. If you are visiting this Web site with other people, how many people in your group? _______ Family
____ Friends
____ Family and friends
____ Organized group such as a class
____ Other (please specify): ______________
6. How did you come here today?
____ Search engine such as Infoseek or Yahoo?7. What is most satisfying about your visits on the Web?____ If you used a search engine, what term (i.e. paleontology, dinosaurs, museum) did you use? (Please specify) ______
____ From another museum page
____ From another page about natural history or paleontology
____ Recommended by a friend
____ Content of the Web pages8. What other types of information or site design would help your visit to our Web site?____ Design of the Web site
____ Ability to learn more about the Museum prior to a visit
____ other (please specify): __________
9. How do you usually find out information about a museum?
___ Online10. Have you participated in any of these museum activities (at any museum) in the past 12 months? Indicate the approximate number of times for those in which you participated.___ Newspaper
___ Radio
___ Television
___ Friends or relatives
___ Membership newsletters
___ Other: ______
| Activity | Number of times |
| Tours | ______ |
| Lectures | ______ |
| Concerts | ______ |
| Library | ______ |
| Classes | ______ |
| Special events | ______ |
| Programs for kids | ______ |
| Gift shop | ______ |
| Restaurant | ______ |
| Other (specify) | ______ |
| Casual visit to museum | ______ |
11. As a child, did you visit any museum for any of the following reasons
_____ Classes12. Is there anything about museums that you think could be improved? You may select up to three items._____ Movies
_____ School tours
_____ Family visits
_____ Concerts
_____ Other (please specify) ________
____ Better directions, visitor information, signs13. Are you a member of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History?____ Stairs, elevator
____ Access for handicapped, for baby strollers
____ Organization or lighting of galleries
____ Arrangement of items in galleries
____ Amount or kind of information on labels
____ Availability and readability of brochures, floor plans
____ Seating accommodations
____ Food or refreshment facilities
____ Restroom or coatroom facilities
____ Location or appearance of museum building
____ Items for sale in giftshop
____ Friendliness or knowledge of personnel
____ Parking
Yes____ No____
14. What is your age? ____
15. Are you Male or Female?
____ Male16. How long (in months) have you been using the Internet and the World Wide Web? _______ Female
17. How would you rate your expertise using the Internet and the World Wide Web
1. Novice18. How would you rate your knowledge of dinosaurs?
2. Some experience
3. Moderate experience
4. Great deal of experience
5. Expert
1. Beginning student19. How would you rate your interest in dinosaurs?
2. Some knowledge
3. Moderate
4. Great deal of knowledge
5. Expert
1. Very little
2. Some interest
3. Moderate interest
4. Great deal of interest
5. Very high level of interest
References
Chadwick, J. C. (1992). The Development of a Museum Multimedia Program. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 1, 331-340.
Chadwick, J.C. (1997). The Difference Between Self-rated Interest in Dinosaurs in New Mexico and Search Strategies Used to reach a Museum Web Site. Spectra, 24 (4), 33-38.
Diamond, J., Bond, A., and Hirumi, A. (1989). Desert Explorations — A videodisc exhibit designed for flexibility. Curator, 32(3), 161-173.
Falk, J. H. and Dierking, L.D. (1992). The Museum Experience. Washington DC: Whalesback Books.
Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (1998). Understanding Free-Choice Learning: A Review of the Research and its Application to Museum Web Sites. In D. Bearman and J Trant (Eds.) Museums and the Web 98 Proceedings (CD-ROM). Archives and Museum Informatics, 1998.
Hood, M.G. (1981). Adult Attitudes Toward Leisure Choices in Relation to Museum Participation. Dissertation Abstracts Online. (University Microfilms No. AAG81-21802).
Hilke, D.D. (1989). The Family as a Learning System: An Observational Study of Families in Museums. Marriage and Family Review, 13, 101-129.
Kiernan, V. (1998). Web Surveys Could Benefit by Offering Freebies, Researcher Suggests [On-line]. Available: http://chronicle.com/daily/98/09/98090901t.htm.
Pitkow, J. & Kehoe, C. (1997b). GVU's 8th WWW User Survey [On-line]. Available: http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1997-10.
Stone, D.E. and Hutson, B.A. (1984). Computer-Based Job Aiding: Problem Solving at Work. Ithica, NY: Cornell University, Department of Education. (Eric Document Reproduction Service No. ED 244 613)
Wulff, R. (1998). Museum Services International. Washington, DC. Unpublished correspondence, MUSEUM-L.