Museums Make Me Happy ...

Museums make me happy. I bet they make you happy too.

And for many regular museum-goers, museums make them, yes, happy.

How do I know? They told me. In my 2017 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, I asked museum-goers to fill in the blank: Museums make me _____.

By far, "happy" was the most common single answer. 

My first response was "that's nice," but it didn't feel meaningful. To be honest, a good, chewy, oatmeal raisin cookie makes me happy as well. So I kept looking at the responses, setting them aside, and returning to them again. And, happily, I think I've put my finger on what's been nagging at me.

When it came to filling in that blank, Museums make me _________, overall, responses fell into three categories:

• Feel. An affective, emotional responses. This includes happy, of course, but also things like "calm," "grateful," and "inspired;" - half of responses.
• Do. What museum experiences made them do. "Learn" (and its synonyms) was the most common action, followed by "think;" - a third of responses.
• Change. How museums have changed the respondents in some way. Made them more curious, open-minded, more empathetic, or a better person; - a quarter of responses.

Note: some people's responses were coded into more than one category, based on what they shared.

To be clear, all of these responses are great outcomes, and almost no one (<1%) said museums had not affected their life in some way. (Keep in mind that this is a sample of museum-goers; a broader population sample would certainly be rather different.)

But the depth of response does differ in these categories. The individuals who gave a feel ​response were, overall, sharing a wonderful, affective response, laden with values. But that emotional response, for most, did not imply that they did anything or changed in any way.

The respondents that did something, like "learn" or "think," gave little indication about how they felt about what they learned or thought about, or what they did with it. Did it matter to them? We can probably presume so, but for most, their answer did not indicate anything.

That makes that last category, with a quarter of responses, all the more interesting. Change. For these respondents, in only a word or two, they were able to articulate something deeper and more powerful … the positive impact that was a result of engaging profoundly with museums … of feeling and thinking. Synthesizing an emotional response to new information, resulting in a positive change. Which is, after all, what we are really after, right?

Now, granted, this question was designed to return very short answers. Follow-up questions in the survey do, indeed, pull out deeper responses from many of these respondents (which I am currently, and painstakingly, coding).  But this quick, initial response is still rather telling about the values placed on museums by museum-goers … and I'm curious to see if those who initially indicated change differ from other museum-goers in other important ways as well. Stay tuned …

The 2017 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers was fielded in January/February 2017. 25 museums across the country participated, with n = 6,162; half of respondents came from children's museums and science centers, half from art or history museums. The questions for this survey were inspired by ongoing conversations within the museum field (who visits museums, why they visit, what do they value about museums, and what motivates them) and ongoing research in the fields of education and psychology around lifelong learning and intrinsic motivation.

If you would like your museum to participate in the 2018 Annual of Survey of Museum-Goers, enrollment is now open!