Enhancing our understanding of museum audiences: visitor studies in the twenty-first century

For more than half a century, ‘visitor studies’ have had a significant influence on how museums understand their audiences. Research into museum audiences has been used to develop museum spaces, exhibitions and programmes, helped to diversify and increase who visits museums, and deepened our collective understanding of why people visit museums and the impact (short-term and long-term) of their experiences. For example, the work carried out by Falk and Dierking (1992;2000), Hein (1998) and Hooper-Greenhill (1994; 2007) into how museum visitors learn has had a profound impact on how museums understand and support visitors’ learning experiences in museums. However, the most surprising thing, as Hein (1998) notes, is that visitor studies took a while to become established. One of the earliest visitor studies in the UK can be traced back to Liverpool Museum in 1884 (which organized visitors into Students, Observers and Loungers, revealing an early propensity to categorization which continues to this day) yet it was not until after the Second World War that, for various reasons, visitor studies began to grow (see Hein 1998; Black 2005). There has been little coherence to how visitor studies has developed in the museum sector despite Visitor Studies organizations being established in Canada (1991), US (1992), Australia (1995) and UK (1998) although there have been attempts such as the former Museum, Library and Archive Council’s Inspiring Learning for All framework in the UK launched in 2004 (see RCMG 2015) – which has led to great diversity in approach but also fragmentation and, in some areas, a frustrating lack of rigour. There are many reasons for this, including the relatively few dedicated visitor research and evaluation posts in museums and the charge that some museum research is anecdotal in nature and lacks credibility, which is often unfairly levelled at qualitative research due to misunderstanding of its value. Although there is a large body of evidence about the effects of museums on audiences, it is largely dispersed across research designed for other purposes