Visitor Research at Museums and Heritage Sites

As mentioned in my last post, there are a lot of questions regarding visits to "difficult" heritage sites and museums. First and foremast, how do visitors engage with an exhibition?

Visitor research at museums and heritage is often concentrated around evaluation, e.g. the success of an exhibition and market research. The most extensive research regarding visitor behaviour has been conducted by the market research company Morris Hargreaves McIntyre. They divided visitors into eight cultural segments based on their motivation. Whilst these segmentations are useful in terms of future marketing, they do not highlight how visitors engage with an exhibition. I also wonder whether these segments would apply for "painful" sites?

Exhibition evaluations tend to focus on learning outcomes which is measured through visitor survey research, focus group research and visitor observation. I remember attending a training course on visitor research at the British Museum and they discovered that visitors tend to spend a maximum of 60 seconds. So do visitors to museums actually engage with exhibits if they don't read labels?

All the previously mentioned research methods have their place in museums and heritage sites however, they only provide us with a brief snapshot of people's experiences to these sites. We often don't know whether people's experiences change throughout the visit and if so, how do they change? We also don't know how visitors engage emotionally with exhibitions. This is particular relevant to "painful sites" or "memory museums" as Silke Arnold-de Simini (2013) calls them in her book "Mediating memory in the museum". Memory museums are characterised by being object poor as ultimately perpetrator did not leave much traces. So if there aren't many exhibits, how do we research the visitor experience?

In Germany, the main aim of the memorial sites is the message "Never again" hence, the focus is very strongly on learning outcomes. Yet, we do not know whether visitors really do engage with this message. Measuring emotions before, throughout and after the visit would provide us with a real insight into how visitors experience traumatic sites. We would know which emotions visitors experience throughout their visit. Are they overwhelmed and therefore they start to disengage or do they feel indifferent? Which influence do architectural clues have on the visitor experience (the Jewish Museum in Berlin created a Holocaust exhibition with a "dead end")? Are these clues necessary?

All these questions remain currently unanswered and I therefore think, "researching" emotions in museums would transform our knowledge about visitors to heritage sites and museums.