In this article, Jacksonville State University's Kay Allen summarizes a 1988 paper in "Curator" written by J. Diamond, A. Smith, and A. Bond. Allen outlines key findings from a study of 14,961 visitors over a three month period as they visited the California Academy of Sciences Discovery Room, which features a collection of games, objects, and exhibits.
In this article, Marilyn G. Hood, Ph.D., of Hood Associates, discusses African-American attendance and non-attendance at art museums. Hood presents findings from focus groups and individual interviews used to better understand African-American feelings about and perceptions of art museums, which she divides into internal dimensions and external dimensions.
In this article, John H. Falk, Ph.D., of Science Learning, Inc., discusses leisure decisions influencing African-Americans use of museums. Falk cites findings from two research studies that investigated the relative importance of a variety of critical variables postulated at possible reasons for the under-utilization of museums by African-Americans.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood and Don Thompson address the issue of how museums can appeal to multicultural audiences and assess the impact of their attempts to attract new audiences. Bitgood and Thompson outline a four-step process for addressing problems of multicultural audiences.
In this article, Don Thompson summarizes a 1993 article featured in the "Visitor Studies: Theory, Research, and Practice" journal, written by G. Donald Adams. Adams describes a project at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, in which newly discovered historical research guided the development and marketing of the Mattox House and African-American exhibit. Adam presents seven different types of research that were conducted during the project.
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Don ThompsonVisitor Studies Association
This article highlights findings from a study conducted by researchers at Jacksonville State University that assessed group visitor behavior at four exhibits at the Anniston Museum of Natural History. Researchers studied if male and female adults behave differently at exhibits when they are with a child than when they are with another adult as well as whether or not adult behavior was consistent across different types of exhibits.
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Stephen BitgoodChifumi KitazawaAndrea CavenderKaren Nettles
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood outlines variables that influence social learning in museums. Bitgood identifies group variables, which include those that originate from the quality or number of people within the group or from the combination of variables as well as exhibit characteristics, or design features of the exhibit that play a critical role in understanding how visitor groups behave.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Amy Cota and Stephen Bitgood share findings from a study of label content, specifically the effects of length and sequence. Researchers aimed to answer the following questions: (1) If the entire label is read, will retention of information be related to the length of the text? and (2) When information is presented in two paragraphs, is the order of presentation important?
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Amy Cota and Stephen Bitgood present abstracts of papers and articles on museum studies focused on memory.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Ann Cleghorn summarizes a 1993 "Museum Management and Curatorship" article written by Paulette M. McManus. The article cites findings from a study of visitor's memories as indicators of the impact of museum visits. The study analyzed visitors ages 8-50 years, who visited "Gallery 33, A Meeting Ground of Cultures in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery," an exhibition about human society and includes materials on beliefs, values, customs, and art from around the world.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood and Ann Cleghorn share findings from a study that attempted to assess recall for three different types of exhibit events: visual (exhibit objects), semantic (label content), and other sensory impressions (sounds, temperature, darkness, touch). The aim of the study was to compare recollections for these three types of knowledge across exhibit areas at the Anniston Museum of Natural History.
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood reviews two studies that assessed knowledge gain in addition to other measures of exhibit effectiveness. These studies used tests of semantic knowledge as measures of exhibit effectiveness, which Bitgood argues are incomplete measures of knowledge and restrict researchers from assessing other types of memory (e.g. visual and episodic).