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Space, Time, and Family Interaction: Visitor Behavior at the Science Museum of Minnesota
Author(s) -
Cone Cynthia A.,
Kendall Keith
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
curator: the museum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 2151-6952
pISSN - 0011-3069
DOI - 10.1111/j.2151-6952.1978.tb00545.x
Subject(s) - visitor pattern , citation , space (punctuation) , sociology , library science , anthropology , computer science , programming language , operating system
“Where did you go?” “To the museum.” “What did you do there?” There is increasing interest today in museums as learning environments rather than as repositories of artifacts. This shift in concern raises questions about how visitors respond to museum displays. Since most people visit museums accompanied by others, such questions necessarily involve the examination of group interaction. This report is the summary of the results of research on visitor behavior in the anthropology hall of the Science Museum of Minnesota, designed and conducted by a group of students and us at Hamline University. Our interest was in the movement and interaction of family groups in the hall. Specifically, we wanted to determine what attracted their attention and if family members interacted differently depending on their generation and sex. On a Saturday and Sunday we observed twenty-six family groups for the entire time they spent in the anthropology hall. Because the analysis of this sample suggested distinct variations in the behavior of family