Parents and Motivations: An (Unexpected) Sneak Peek

Light bulbs are blazing in my head as I just figured out a tricky segmentation of parents and their motivations around learning.

So let's explain the graphic.  Among parents who had visited museums at least once in the past year:

• Nearly half visit for other people.  Their children, primarily.  That is, they visit for extrinsic reasons, not because they themselves are that interested in learning.
• About 10% visit for personally functional reasons. The museum fits a need or very specific interest, but they are not visiting because they are that curious about new things, and neither are they visiting for their children.
• About a third do personally enjoy learning new things, but it is not their primary motivation. Instead, it is a contributing motivator, along with functional reasons and to benefit their children.
• About 10% are Super Intrinsic learners.  A love of learning is likely their primary motivation, but that doesn't mean they don't have extrinsic motivations as well; indeed, they are just as likely to say they visit for their children to learn.  I suspect their enthusiasm for learning may provide markedly different experiences for their children, however.

Note that this data, from a broader population sample, only refers to parents who actually had visited a museum in the past year.  I am pretty confident of these segments within that group, especially since some of it makes sense in the context of what good evaluators often find in their work. What's new is being able to put numbers to these segments more broadly.  

Additionally, I'm not deep enough in the analysis to estimate what percentage of parents overall they comprise or to discuss how an intrinsic motivation around learning (and visiting museums) matters to families and their engagement in their community. That's coming.

Finally, remember that the purpose of the survey isn't parents.  During my analysis, I found myself digging deeper to understand what the data was saying about parents, but there is a lot more about all adults coming!


The questions for this survey have been inspired by ongoing conversations within the museum field (who goes to museums, why they visit, and what that means for communities) and ongoing research in the fields of education and psychology around lifelong learning and intrinsic motivation.