A survey was conducted by asking 80 people who often visit art museums or exhibitions. The participants came from five different nations which are China, UK, Thailand, Brazil and Russia. The purpose of this questionnaire is to assess personal preferences and experiences in museums.
The online questionnaire was collected from a total of 80 participants via the Google Survey platform from the 8th to the 15th of June. There are 68% of females and 32% of males, between 22 to 32 years old.
In order to obtain the obvious amount of quantitive data, the below questions are designed in just a few options and in a straightforward way to make it easier for subjects to answer efficiently.
- Gender/ Nation/ Age
- Do you usually like to take photos in museums?
- Do you feel disturbed when someone takes photos with the artworks or selfies in the museum?
- What usually attracts you to an exhibition? (Multiple)
According to the research result, there are 57.5% of participants like to take photos in the museum, and 42.5% don’t like it. However, there are nearly two-thirds of people(65%) felt that when someone takes photos with the artworks or selfies in the museum was disturbing to them.
In addition, the research also observes that the major reason for attracting people to visit the art museum or exhibition is to enjoy the art atmosphere, and the second one is to gain inspiration.
//Reflective report//
In order to quickly get a broad understanding of what the stakeholders think, the questions were not designed with enough detail and precision. For instance, I discovered that more than half of the participants like to take photos in museums, but at the same time, many of them feel that taking selfies at exhibitions is annoying. This made me realize that there are many different ways of taking photos in an exhibition and that perhaps most people are accepting of taking pictures of the works with their phones as documenting them but not posing in front of the exhibits or taking selfies. Next time I would like to investigate that different behaviour in more detail.
Moreover, as the data on Asians is still more readily available to me, the majority of the subjects in this questionnaire were from China and Taiwan. This may have resulted in a lack of diversity in the questionnaire respondents. Perhaps next time I should try another way to get more ideas from people in different parts of the world.