Frequency of museum attendance: motivation matters

Abstract

Some recent empirical contributions have highlighted that tourists often\ud go to museums yet appear to extract little utility from the experience. We argue that\ud this is often the case with agents who visit museums only while on holiday and\ud results from a temporary lack of substitute experience goods or compliance with a\ud must-do list. If such agents behaved according to Stigler and Becker’s rational\ud addiction theory, they would also visit museums while at home. However, most do\ud not, which makes them constantly occasional consumers. We indirectly test for the\ud presence of constantly occasional museum attendance by tourists, using data from a\ud survey conducted in 2012 at Vittoriale, the most popular museum at Lake Garda, a\ud renowned Italian tourist destination. By applying multiple correspondence analysis\ud to a question on motivations to visit the museum, we obtain two dimensions of\ud motivation: one based on a search for knowledge and the other based on a more\ud recreational attitude. Identification of the latter is a new finding in itself. We include\ud these dimensions as regressors in a model used to explain museum attendance. We\ud find, as expected, that light consumption negatively affects attendance. We therefore\ud argue that empirical analyses of museum attendance should not disregard light\ud motivation as a possible driver

Pompeii dilemma: A motivation‐based analysis of tourists' preference for “superstar” archaeological attractors or less renowned archaeological sites in the Vesuvius area

“…Kim et al () underline the evidence of similar cultural behaviour during everyday life and travel periods. Brida et al () reach contrasting results inasmuch as they reveal that occasional cultural attendance is very widespread among museum visitors. They investigate the role of motivation in cultural attendance, revealing that it is very important in determining visits to museum.…”

“…Presumably, the focus on one summer month could affect the reliability of the results because the profile of visitors over the period considered by the survey can differ from the one of visitors during other periods. Nevertheless, as noted by Brida et al (), the empirical literature in field of tourism and cultural economics mainly relies on self‐administered questionnaires through convenience sampling.…”

Economics of cultural tourism: issues and perspectives

“…Zieba (2016) finds that foreign tourism flows have a significant positive impact on opera, operetta and musical attendance in Austria. Brida et al (2016) outline that the motivations of tourists, as museum visitors, are not necessarily cultural but recreational, perhaps better considered as associated with an entertainment type of tourism. Another type of relationship between culture heritage and tourism refers to the efficiency of tourism destination: Cuccia et al (2016) suggest that heritage included in the WHL affects negatively the efficiency of a tourism destination as the WHL inscription raises expectations, which are not met by an equivalent increase of tourism flows.…”

Changes in cultural consumption: ethnographic collections in Wikipedia

“…curiosity, spending free time) and satisfying an information need (e.g. learning something new, research) (Brida et al, 2015;Frey, 1998;Johnson & Thomas, 1998). Motivation for online heritage consumption has been linked first and foremost to remote access (Booth, 1998), but also to academic research, creative reuse, educational use, commemorative use, personal enjoyment, preservation and commercial use .…”

“…Visiting museums has become an important leisure activity and touristic attraction (Frey & Meier, 2006), predominantly to institutions with a higher ease of physical accessibility (Brook, 2016) and particularly for visitors with higher levels of education, income (Falk & Katz-Gerro, 2015), and an intellectual motivation (Brida, Dalle Nogare, & Scuderi, 2015). Understanding consumer preference for cultural goods has further identified a pattern where few products are extremely popular, while the majority of content remains obscure (Clement, Proppe, & Rott, 2007;Ginsburgh & van Ours, 2003).…”