Profiling visitors to Dalarna Museum : What are the motivational factors that influence visitors' frequency of visits

Abstract: Prior studies on museum visitors are extensively centred on national museums, the studies on regional museums are scarce. To fill in the academic gap, a research is proposed concerning the visitors of Dalarna Museum, a regional museum in Sweden. With an aim to profile visitors’ demographic characteristics and investigate the motivational factors that influence visitors’ frequency of visits, a face-to-face questionnaire survey was implemented at Dalarna Museum. To get visitors’ demographic characteristics, a few closed and open questions are devised to profile visitors’ gender, age, occupation, income, education, number of children and residence place. To investigate the motivational factors that influence visitors’ frequency of visits, a seven-point Likert questionnaire is employed with 17 motivational factors included. During a 12-day data collection, 372 visitors were invited to participate in the questionnaire survey, whereof 357 had filled in the questionnaire, generating a response rate that is as high as 96 percent. After data cleansing, there are 355 completed and valid responses in total. According to the results, some of visitors’ demographic characteristics are similar including gender, age, occupation, income, and number of children. However, the characteristics regarding visitors’ residence places and educational attainments are different comparing the frequent visitors to occasional visitors. Through running a multiple regression analysis, 13 out of the 17 motivational factors are detected having significant influences on visitors’ frequency of visits to Dalarna Museum, of which the most influential one is visitors’ day-outs with their friends and relatives.