Abstract

The Palace Museum is a national museum in Beijing, China. Being built during the consecutive Ming and Qing dynasties, the Palace Museum would be 600 years old in 2020. As one of the oldest museums, the Palace Museum accepted over 17 million visitors in 2018, which makes it the most visited museum in the world. This paper aims at these three objectives: 1) What is the educational and cultural significance of the Palace Museum? 2) What are the factors that attract/prevent university students from engaging with the Palace Museum? 3)What are the possible strategies for the Palace Museum’s future development?

To achieve the above goals, this paper conducts qualitative research methods to collect primary and secondary data and analyzes the data through manual coding, content analysis, and descriptive statistics. Through secondary resources and the questionnaire survey, this paper finds out that the inherent cultural and educational significance of museums is generally recognized and nicely fulfilled by the Palace Museum.

The most significant cognitive motivation of college students to visit the Palace Museum is learning and interest, which is quite positive. However, they have also claimed that certain factors such as the long waiting time and exhausting transportation might have prevented them from visiting. Eventually, this paper proposed four recommendations for the Palace Museum to increase the college students’ engagement, including continue to maintain a competitive edge in exhibits, strengthen the education strategy for college students, further increase publicity and promote industrial integration, and improve infrastructure and provide better audience management.

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background

Each nation possesses its own unique culture – although its forms and content vary widely, they share a common function: to carry on the traditions of the past and to shape the spiritual character of new generations. Among different “culture guardians” to collect, study, and demonstrate folklore and inheritance, museums have become an ultimate carrier that connects the past, the present, and the future.

In short, museums fulfill a significant educational mission. Originally, museums came about as a way to display the private collections of wealthy individuals, families, or institutions of art and rare or curious natural objects and artifacts. Their private collections were usually displayed in “wonder rooms” or otherwise known as cabinets of curiosity. According to NEMO (the Network of European Museum Organizations), the oldest museum in evidence worldwide is the Ennigaldi-Nanna’s museum, which contains personal collections of a Babylonian princess and was built 2,500 years ago (2019), it is located in modern-day Dhi Qar Governorate of Iraq. The long history of museums contributes to the formation of museology that has been evolving for decades, and a global museum community has gradually become visible.

The Palace Museum (Chinese: 故宫博物院), also known as the Forbidden City (Chinese: 紫禁城) is a national museum in Beijing, China. Being built during the consecutive Ming and Qing dynasties, the Palace Museum would be 600 years old in 2020. The Palace Museum is the world’s largest and most preserved wooden structure palace complex with 1,862,690 pieces of collections currently (the Palace Museum, 2019). It is the pride of the Chinese nation and the precious cultural heritage of all mankind. The design of the Palace Museum originated from the royal architecture of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Its cultural roots could be traced far back to the 2nd century BCE when Zhou Li (The Rites of Zhou) was created (Gao, 2016).

This classic piece of work aims at establishing and maintaining social orders through Confucian principles and has left long-term Confucian dynamism to the Chinese nation till today. As the dominant philosophical system in Chinese society, Confucianism determines that a well-designed palace complex shall foster stability and prosperity, as well as revealing the harmony between humans and nature. Based on this traditional value, the Forbidden City is not a singular architecture but involves a large scale of urban planning of the capital of China. The location and surroundings of the Forbidden City are shown in Figure 2 below.

Coming from this structure, the current Palace Museum not only stands for a traditional imperial building. More importantly, the Palace Museum and its surroundings form a museum cluster located in the central historical district of Beijing. In addition to a sufficient number of museums, museum clusters represent museums of different levels to meet the diverse needs of the audience to jointly activate an entire area and a cultural atmosphere of a city (Tien, 2008). Components that contribute the shaping the Palace Museum cluster include its location, local community engagement, and collective cooperation, etc. The secret to the success of the Palace Museum is the uniqueness of the local cultural resources. By revitalizing specific districts of Beijing, the Palace Museum provides a great cultural experience for residents and visitors.

The Palace Museum also pays a lot of attention to fulfill its educational functions. As a matter of fact, the Palace Museum and the CAG (China Architecture Design & Research Group) jointly launched the Integrated Plan for the Protection of The Palace Museum (2013-2025), proposing that 85% of the space would be opened to the public in 2025 to further enhance the protection and utilization of the Palace Museum and to fulfill the mission of social education and cultural communication (UNWTO/WTCF, 2018).

Furthermore, the Palace Museum has entered a “service era” and user experience has become the key to retaining its audience. The Palace Museum produced 9 smartphone apps and a large number of publications and peripheral items. The construction of its official website provides a fantastic digital experience for the audience from a distance through its online library, audio-visual service, games, and links to its Taobao stores. It could be seen from these efforts that the Palace Museum has established a clear educational positioning of itself. More people are devoting to the in-depth and meticulous research on the ancient architecture and cultural and historical relics intend to reveal the profound Chinese national wisdom and culture contained in the Palace Museum.

As a result of these changes, the Palace Museum accepted over 17 million visitors in 2018, which makes it the most visited museum in the world. Young people are the main force to visit the Palace Museum – 40% of the visitors are under 30 years old (China Daily, 2018). Furthermore, in 2018 people under age 30 makeup 44.9% of all visitors to museums in general (Ren, Zu, 2019).

Studying the audience of museums in terms of their characteristics, motivations, attitudes, feedbacks, etc. is an effective method to determine future strategies of museums. However, the current relevant research lacks a further subdivision of the young audience of museums in general, not to mention research specific to the Palace Museum.
This paper selects university students in Beijing to provide definitive research and tries to define the affecting factors on their visits to the Palace Museum. The reasoning behind selecting students in Beijing is as follows:

Beijing is the capital city of China and the home to many of the most prestigious universities in the country. As a result, people from every corner of the country flock to Beijing for their undergraduate education, as well as, international students from many different countries. There is a total of 82 Universities in Beijing, with student totals of upwards of 900 thousand undergraduate students alone (Ren,2017). This allows for greater diversity in my research pool; either in terms of socio-economic or even cultural background. The number of students on scholarships is too insignificant to make a difference.

In addition, the average university student in China is not wealthy, with a few anomalies. However, tuition fee for local students is very cheap, barely a fraction of what universities in the UK and US charge. Eventually, this paper proposes brief recommendations for the Palace Museum to better fulfill its educational duty and to bring more university students in.

1.2 Research Questions and Objectives

Education that is devoid of culture tends to be shallow and ignorant. The collections, activities, and facilities of museums all represent marvelous and abundant educational resources. Regarding museums from this perspective, this paper sets major aims of exploring how these resources have been used to attract a wider range of audiences and what strategic methods could be applied hereafter.

To clarify the research subject, this paper has developed four keywords: the educational functions of museums, the audience of museums, the Palace Museum, and university students. Based on the aims and keywords, this paper identifies three objectives:

  • What is the educational and cultural significance of the Palace Museum from a student’s perspective?
  • What are the factors that attract/prevent university students from engaging with the Palace Museum?
  • What are the possible feasibility strategies for the Palace Museum’s future development?

Each objective reflects the important theoretical and practical significance of this paper. The cultural and educational functions are the cornerstone of museums’ attractiveness; putting efforts in exhibition design, event planning, and support facilities is the prerequisite for museums to maximize their public value; and establishing the connection between audience segmentation and social education contributes to the improvement of museums’ educational functions with a more scientific attitude and more realistic methods. At the same time, through preliminary research, it has been found that there are very few special studies on university students and this fact has made this paper having a high level of originality and creativity.

1.3 Research Content and Structure

This paper contains five major sections. The introduction points out the research background, objectives and significance, and the overall layout of the paper. The literature review is conducted from three perspectives including the cultural and educational significance of museums, the visiting motivation and audience segmentation of museums, and the factors that affect university students’ engagement with museums.

The methodology introduces the methods for data collection and analysis of this paper. This paper conducts qualitative research methods to collect primary and secondary data and analyzes the data through manual coding, content analysis, and descriptive statistics. This chapter also clarifies the ethical considerations.

The findings of this paper are formed from two data sources. Secondary data helps to discover the status quo and the current audience management system of the Palace Museum. While the primary data helps to analyze the actual attitude towards the Palace Museum of university students in Beijing.
The conclusion of this paper summarizes the major findings, provides recommendations and states the limitations of this paper.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 The Cultural and Educational Significance of Museums
2.1.1 The Diverse Definition of Museums

Essentially, the cultural and educational significance of museums is hidden in its ever-developing diverse definition. I find it prudent to define Museums in this paper due to factors such as The Palace Museum, not strictly being a museum as it is more of a tourist site is only sometimes classified as museums by their national cultural agencies. As a result, lists such as “the most visited museums” cite the Louvre being the most visited museum in 2018, with only 10 million visitors.

In the article, they explained and I quote “some well-attended palace museums are not included in either publication, although they are sometimes classified as museums by their respective national cultural agencies.” (Loredana, 2019). At present, the commonly approved definition of museums come from ICOM (International Council of Museums), which was founded in the 1940s. The newest concept of museums was settled in 2007 according to the ICOM Statutes:

“Museums refer to permanent non-profit institutions that open to the society…the purpose of museums is to promote public education, learning, and enjoyment.”

In addition, ICOM proposed over 250 concepts for most countries and regions around the world. In China, museums are defined as a social phenomenon that reveals people’s world views and ideologies (ICOM, 2019).
Other organizations and scholars have also tried to identify museums and the concepts share lots of similarities – UNESCO actually uses the ICOM concept (UNESCO, 2019). MA (the Museums Association) in the UK agreed on a museum concept in 1998, it portrays museums as “institutions that allow people to be inspired, study, and enjoy collections (MA, 2019).”

The most common words used to describe a museum include “open to the public, educational/education, cultural/culture, historical/history, artistic/art, value, enjoyment/enjoy… (Günay, 2012).” As could be seen from these definitions, museums are very functional. But a minor issue is that most of these concepts use serious written language and lacks vivid and close-to-life examples to stimulate the public interest. On the contrary, AAM (American Association of Museums) does not directly give a clear idea of what a museum is, instead, it uses metaphors to depict museums more intuitively.

It likens museums to “economic engines” and “community anchors” and claims that museums serve the public as the public enjoys museums (AAM, 2019). Undoubtedly, this introduction could enable the public to better understand the concept and social benefits of museums. When browsing the website for additional information, people are already learning some knowledge about museums, therefore museums have begun to perform their educational functions at this point.

Based on the above information, this paper summarizes four elements of museums: inheritance, sharing, education, and creativity. Moreover, museums and the public interact along with the creations and development of museums and social progress, therefore this relationship formed a special museum culture. As well as, creates a category that the Palace Museum falls into.

2.1.2 The Cognition and Imagery of Museum

In the field of psychology, cognition refers to the mental function of individual thinking in information processing, or the process of acquiring knowledge through the formation of psychological activities such as concept, perception, judgment, or imagination. The cognitive process can be natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious (Hsing, 2017). The perception of museums is considered by many to be the best resource for providing historical artifacts. So, we could summarize that visiting museums is often seen as a rational experience, emphasizing the understanding of facts. In the informal learning institutions in museums, cognitive functions focus on the correctness and richness of information and message delivery.

More and more museum scholars have begun to emphasize the exploration and development of cognitive factors and claimed that the positive emotions experienced by museums could promote the audience’s memory and learning. The learning experience provided by museums does not only refer to the accumulation of knowledge and information, but also the development of skills and affective attitudes (Dierking, 1991).

As a result, the audience gets to construct different learning styles and acquire rich knowledge from the experience of visiting museums. Questions focus on the cognitive factors that have been proposed as well. For example, as Falk and Dierking (2000) asked, “why do people go to museums? What could people learn from museums? What kind of services could museums offer? Do the facilities in museums contribute to more advanced studying experience?” These questions imply that the cognitive research of museum management is getting deeper and wider.

In addition, some scholars believe that the core values of museums are lying in the exhibitions or collections, which give the audience a sentimental experience and full of affection (Fleming, 2016). From this perspective, museums could be an influential platform for connecting different opinions of individuals and groups. The audience could condense different points of view into a maturer collective consensus through dialogue, reflection, discussion, and evidence.

Museums are the results of the integration of cognition and imagery. By establishing various psychological spaces, people form an understanding of the image of things, gain a comprehensive realization, and ultimately improve their efficiency and creativity. The exploration of cognitive factors could construct the basic cognition of psychology in this article, which is very helpful for the design of research and expands the connotation of this study.

2.2 Visiting Motivation and Museum Audience Segmentation
2.2.1 Research on Visiting Motivations

Determining the motivations behind why visitors come to a given museum is one of the most important points of this paper, and serves as the premise for identifying the factors affecting the visiting behaviors and other ancillary behaviors of college students. Because this study is exploratory, no specific assumptions have been set, allowing for the open discussion of what attracts audiences to visit the museum.

This paper selects JSTOR as the main online database for content analysis to obtain the current status of research on museum visit motivation. JSTOR is considered a relatively reliable independent non-profit organization that provides comprehensive search engine service with access to the full repositories of hundreds of well-known academic journal articles (JSTOR, 2019).

During the literature search process, the paper searched for three sets of keywords: “museum, visiting motivation”; “museum, attract, the audience”; and “the Palace Museum, audience motivation”. All searches were performed from a limited period of 2009 to 2019, and the different keyword sets respectively received 2,589, 6,877, and 910 results. These numbers show that there should be more than enough materials to support this research study, but also that there is significant additional space for a specific study of the Palace Museum.

Although there seems to be a great surfeit of articles on general motivational studies on museum visitation, the actual relevant or applicable studies are very few. To further narrow down and locate actual helpful articles, this paper conducts a manual review of the results to sort the final references for this paper. Partial keywords are shown in Table 1 below (specific articles see References).

Table 1 shows the most commonly used framework to analyze the visiting motivations of museums, most of the practical research or latter surveys depend on those theories. In addition, Packer and Ballantyne (2002) proposed a framework for the connection between motivational factors and outcomes as shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Relationships between motivations and outcomes
These motivations are then to be coded for a second time in later sections to determine the preparation and elements to be analyzed in the questionnaire.

2.2.2 Museum Audience Segmentation

The museum’s audience structure can be classified according to the degree of participation or basic characteristics. User segmentation plays a pivotal role in the future decision-making of the museum’s operations and management. The popularity of museums in western countries is high, so there are a number of relevant reports on the topic.
From the perspective of basic characteristics, in the United Kingdom, for example, survey reports show that the proportion of museums visited by different age groups is relatively close, with the population over 65 makings up the largest share.

The number of female audience members also exceeds that of male audience members. The distance the visitor lives from the given museum is also an important factor in dividing the audience. The farther the audience lives from the given museum, the more time they spend in the museum. In terms of the means of visitation, the museum audience can be divided into young creatives, families, older learners, and cultural tourists. Moreover, group visitors account for the largest proportion of these four groups (the Audience Agency, 2018).

This study is interesting, as the demographic trend is the opposite of what it is in China, another important element is that the distance of which a visitor lives from the museum. In my research, this will also be investigated, or rather what negates the effect of distance, because there are no universities within a 5km radius of the Palace Museum. Furthermore, in the coming years, this situation will be further exacerbated as the Chinese government is encouraging universities and higher education institutions to move their campus to the outskirts of Beijing, with a minimum distance of 25km to the Palace Museum.

In terms of participation, taking the Museums Victoria as an example, the visiting audience is divided into the following categories.

Figure 4: Audience Segmentation of Museums Victoria (Source: Beucler et al., 2016)

In contrast, China has few well-developed research reports on museum attendance or internal management. However, the audience of Chinese museums continues to grow and the prospects for growth are very optimistic in the Chinese museum market, particularly based on the past performance although growth seems to be rounding out and the explosive growth of the previous decade seems to be coming to a close.

Figure 5: numbers of museums in China from 1905-2015 (Source: Zhang, 2016)

From the audience data in 2018, 40% of the visitors were under the age of 30, 24% of the audience were 30-40 years old, and 17.5% of the audience was 40-50 years old, showing that the younger audience has become the “main force” in visiting the Palace Museum. In terms of geographical distribution, the number of visitors from neighboring provinces such as Shandong, Hebei, Henan, and Jiangsu were the highest, accounting for 4.68 million person-times/individual sessions, accounting for 27.5% of the total number of visitors.

The audience in Beijing (the city in which the Palace Museum is located) showed the most interest, with 417,000 visitors from Shanghai as well. The audiences from Tianjin and Chongqing were 310,000 and 214,000 respectively (Wang, 2018). Special exhibitions are also being installed on the main travel route within the Palace Museum in order to attract more viewers. In 2017, the Along the River During the Qingming Festival 3.0 (Chinese: 清明上河图3.0) high-tech interactive art exhibition attracted more than 1.4 million visitors, and the Palace Culture has been increasingly integrated into the public life of the city.

These statistics tell us that the younger demographic makes up a large portion of the Palace Museum visitors, however, they do not tell me how many of them are students and/or their motivation for going to the Palace Museum.

The study showing the number of people visiting from neighboring cities is also relevant because in Beijing a lot of students aren’t residents of this province, they have the option to temporarily change their residency status, however, not all of them choose to do so which might have skewered the results of this study, especially during the offseason. However, the biggest contribution of this study to my research is that of the 17 million visitors the Palace Museum has had, these major neighboring cities contribute around 900,000 visitors, giving me a large pool of research subjects to collect my data from.

2.2.3 Characteristics of University Students as a Group

As a special group, the characteristics of college students have many angles that can be analyzed. This section first points out that the objective conditions of college students have an impact on their choice of schools. For example, students in developed areas are more willing to choose to study in similarly developed cities or locations. Other factors such as socio-economic background, values ​​and attitudes, and personality traits also affect students’ consideration of factors such as geography, development level, traffic level, and cultural atmosphere, all of which affect the individual’s process of choosing a university (Heist, 2016).

In addition, compared with other age groups, college students tend to be more energetic, more likely to accept new things, and pursue more hobbies. However, in recent years, there have been more and more negative emotions and even prevalence of mental illness among college students. In terms of the audience of the museum, college students are a very important target audience. Most museums often treat college students as part of the adult group when conducting educational or marketing activities. Therefore, there is no specific analysis of college students as an audience.

Therefore, in order to keep the analysis as close as possible to the characteristics of the college student group, this paper sets museum visitation as a type of consumer behavior. This choice was made because there are plenty of studies on college students as consumers, allowing us to identify some of their unique qualities. Furthermore, museums can be considered a consumption of arts and culture. Through the reading of different documents, this paper summarizes the characteristics of 10 Chinese college students as a consumer group (Wang & Xu, 2009; Wang, 2018; Zou, 2018; Lai, 2010, etc.):

  • (1) A large number of people and a large consumption capacity.
  • (2) Have a certain amount of immediate purchasing power.
  • (3) Ability to establish long-term effects for the brand.
  • (4) Consumption incentives include prices, brands, culture, trends, and convenience of purchase.
  • (5) As a social consumer group: Students study, work, and live together, are of similar age, and have many common consumption characteristics. Colleges and universities are areas with very high population density, and the number of students is highly concentrated.
  • (6) Student groups and regions feature high-flow consumption, and college students tend to easily accept new products, ideas, and services, but they are vulnerable to peer pressure and tend to go along with others’ interests, activities, and consumption behaviors.
  • (7) Students are the weakest of consumers, in terms of purchasing power, but hold outsized influence in marketing terms.
  • (8) Most students, especially senior students, do not do their spending on campus, and consumption funds flow outward into general society rather than remaining locked in the campus system.
  • (9) Student consumption has shown a steady growth trend.
  • (10) Consumption variables are relatively easy to describe and control and constitute a relatively simple market. These studies give us a general idea of university students as a consumer group.

As stated earlier, visiting museums is an act of consumption for arts and culture, therefore these attributes can be used when designing questions for the survey. The study also outlines the progression of students’ consumption trend, as they become more independent and start to explore their own interests without the influence of their parents and family members.

2.3 Factors that Affect University Students’ Engagement with Museums
2.3.1 Objective Factors

The objective indicators that influence the relationship between college students and museums include two aspects, the student perspective, and the museum perspective. The objective situation of the museum is the most basic part, including ticket prices, waiting time, public transportation, infrastructure, auxiliary facilities, and service attitudes. Zhang interviewed Lu Jiansong, director of the China Cultural Relics Academy.

He pointed out that the real feelings of many museum audiences are “don’t understand, don’t see clearly, and don’t remember” the collections (2019). Analyzing this situation, the author thinks that museums must develop a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural symbolism behind the relics to “activate the collections. At the same time, museums need to transform the academic content into more civilian languages so the normal public could understand.

The student’s perspective includes the student’s background such as household registration, grade, majors, living expenses, and other factors. In addition, the auxiliary school education activities are also an objective indicator, including the following aspects: teaching, demonstration, roadshow, identification of specimens, and teaching observation services inside universities, so that students who are inconvenient to go to museums can also enjoy the resources. The development and production of teaching aids and the development of supplementary textbooks related to the school curriculum to enrich the connotation of school education shall also be beneficial.

Another approach is lending services for teaching materials and teaching aids, including the provision of educational specimens in the museums (Yang, 2008). Other activities such as correspondence courses, student internships, teacher training, and educational staff symposia could also be arranged at school to encourage the engagement of students and museums.

The museum is a cultural symbol of the city. It is not only the best place for tourists to explore the city culture, but also a historical and cultural education institution. Paying more attention to the improvement of objective elements is the most important thing to attract more audiences.

2.3.2 Museums’ Construction and Attractiveness

In addition to the objective resources mentioned above, the museum’s own construction and attractiveness are also reflected in the marketing and promotional events, and derivatives. For better marketing of museums, managers shall profoundly switch their positioning of museums and transform the concept of museums from preservation appliers to service providers.

Figure 6 Transition of Museum Identity (Source: Beucler et al., 2016)

Based on this transition, the focus of the museum’s communication goals should be spread outside the organization, which means information dissemination outside the organization. In addition to organizations (institutions), it includes the public, as well as similar organizations and other related organizations, such as government, media, universities, etc. (Yang, 2008). External communication of the organization can effectively realize the function of the museum to provide services to the public, create and maintain the image of the organization, and coordinate the relationship between the organizations. Museum communication has obvious attributes of mass communication, but its status in mass communication has not been clear.

The promotion of digital platforms is also very important and a detailed introduction will be made on the marketing strategy of the Palace Museum in the later chapters. In addition, the application of new interactive technologies is an important factor in attracting younger audiences. The dynamic display appeared in 1851 (the Science Museum, London, UK) and evolved with the rapid development of high technology. Exhibits demonstrate a natural phenomenon, natural law, or a function to the audience during movements. It is often necessary for the participation of the audience (Falk & Dierking, 2000). The museum is transforming from static to dynamic, with more technology to create a better audience experience environment.

The surrounding industries of the Palace Museum include the launch of its own products and cooperation between the industries. According to a survey, the mainstream consumers of the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum are those who are younger than 40 years old. Among them, college students are the best target group for the development of culture and creative industries because they have the ability to quickly accept new cultures (Tu, Liu, & Cui, 2019).

This situation embodies consumer preferences, where college students are willing to pay a premium for their favorite items, and certain preferences lead to repetitive behavior. Cultural preferences are the counterparts of personal hobbies or tendencies and are related to culture. Cultural preference also represents the cognitive tendency of consumers, formed in a common cultural environment and is the common pursuit driven by the common values of the group. Taking advantage of this can effectively attract college students.

2.3.3 Individual Cognitive Motivations

The cognitive evaluation theory points out that the motive of human behavior is driven by two kinds of compensation, namely external consequences and internal motivation. When the expected compensation is derived from outside the behavior, this behavior considered as an additional motivational behavior. Activities that add motivational behavior are only tools to obtain some external outcomes, such as getting approval, avoiding punishment, obtaining a degree, or achieving a social expectation.

When a person’s behavior is driven by intrinsic motivation, the reason why he/she engages in this activity is to do the matter itself, even if he/she does not receive any external compensation (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The above general principles of human behavioral motives also apply to human learning behavior. In fact, most people’s learning behavior is driven by extrinsic motivation, and the act of acquiring knowledge is rarely liked by engaging in such behavior itself. With regard to extrinsic motivation, studies have shown that there is a certain connection between the way information is obtained and intrinsic motivation.

How students get information about museums determines whether they will visit a museum. However, the real challenge for museums to attract audiences is that museums must rely heavily on the audience’s internal rewards because they do not have any means of forcing the audience to concentrate (Csikszentmihalyi & Hemanson, 1995). Museum audiences have a wide range of interests and diverse backgrounds, which determines that they cannot promote their learning behavior in a single way.

From the perspective of the motivation of the young audience, it can be divided into three levels, see Table 2.

Combined the statements in Table 2 with the characteristics of the college students, it can be seen that the museum should increase the participation of medium participants, because low-engagement participants are subject to objective factors, and they usually have other hobbies. Therefore, this paper designs three intrinsic motivations in the general direction, which are leisure, learning, and social needs.

2.4 Summary

In summary, museum audience research is still in the developmental stage, especially in China. This section has conducted research on three important issues and laid the theoretical foundation for further research. The most important issue to be tackled next is to determine the significance of the general museum and their motivation for visiting, and then summarize the factors that affect the university students’ visit to the museum.

Based on these preliminary foundations, this paper forms the basis for the preparation of theoretical ideas and questionnaires to be used to further investigate this issue. However, these studies are still different from my own research question, however, they provide a basic framework I can use to conduct a pilot questionnaire to help to narrow down the demographic who are more relevant to my study.

Chapter Three Methodology

This section introduces the overall implementation of this research study, including the research design, the methods used in the data collection and analysis, research ethics, and limitations. In order to increase the paper’s reliability and validity, this paper covers both secondary and primary sources. Specifically, secondary data shall be collected from qualified sources, such as government publications, peer-reviewed academic articles, frequently recommended databases, etc. Primary data shall be collected through a legitimate questionnaire survey.

3.1 Research Design

  • Quantitative Research

Compared to qualitative research, quantitative research works better at measuring trends, and collect data that is usually statistically analyzed and used in guiding better decisions. Another reason why quantitative study scores over other methods are that it is relatively economical, easier to render, and quicker for respondents to answer (Mukherjee 2019).

For respondents, answering multiple-choice questions in a questionnaire is much easier than qualitative researches where respondents have to frame their answers in detail. Generally, quantitative research methods refer to approaches such as web or e-mail based surveys, questionnaires, etc., which could provide insight from different perspectives.

The data will be quantified using the methods listed in the data analysis section below, such as coding and content analysis. Furthermore, I structured the questionnaire to facilitate quantifying the data. This paper uses a structured questionnaire with only one open question in the student background part among 12 total questions. The questionnaire contains both single-choice and multi-choice questions to collect data.

To avoid the situation that respondents feel confused or exhausted, no more than 10 answers are provided in a single question. As for the type, this paper conducts a web-based questionnaire and uses social media to send the questionnaires to increase efficiency. The most obvious disadvantage of the research is the sample size.

  • Exploratory research

Exploratory research is part of qualitative research. Instead of final and conclusive work outcomes, it aims at exploring new evidence and providing tentative opinions on certain perspectives of a topic (Reiter, 2017). It can be seen that exploratory research helps to define the background of issues and to characterize the problems, leading to more clear and accurate results.

This paper takes a cautious attitude to investigate the engagement between university students and museums. It is necessary and practical to use exploratory research in different stages of this paper since the purpose is to generate insights. Although there are adequate literature and materials associated with the sub-topics of this research, it seems that particular research on the Palace Museum from a similar angle does not exist. In the absence of broad theories and information, exploratory research could help this paper propose new ideas and reveal the actual factors that affect the college students’ motivations to visit the Palace Museum.

3.2 Data Collection Methods

  • Secondary Data Collection

Secondary data refers to published books, journals, newspapers, and other forms whether written or online. To maximize the validity and reliability, this paper sets the following criteria of secondary data selection:

  1.  the date of publication shall be within the past 10 years as new as possible (other than a small number of classic theories);
  2. all selected data must be from qualified sources such as peer-reviewed journals, at this point, authors’ credential is also taken into considerations;
  3.  the depth, overall quality, and level of enlightenment is also an important standard when choosing secondary data, for example, anything on the undergraduate level shall be excluded.

According to the above criteria, this paper establishes its own database with a large number of materials in various forms. It shall be mentioned that, not surprisingly, the official website of the Palace Museum in Mandarin and English shows great discrepancies. Therefore, this paper also refers to its Chinese website for more information.

Primary Data Collection – Questionnaire and field trips

Fundamentally, primary data contains better timeliness, credibility, and confidentiality. It could also answer questions that secondary data cannot (Burgess, 2001). Especially for the research topic of this paper – on a certain target group from a certain place related to a certain museum. A questionnaire survey is a commonly used method to collect primary data aiming at understanding a situation or seeking advice from a group of people.

This study requires the questionnaire approach because of the efficacy of this method, it is not limited by manpower or time in a day, online tools and social media allow me to reach a large number of participants and they can participate within the comfort of their own homes. In addition, it can cover every aspect of this topic I want to cover.

During my literature review, I found another questionnaire online studying the age range of museum visitors, however, it also covers a wide range of questions such as how people perceive museums and so on. Therefore, I believe this is the correct method for this paper as well, especially in a populous city such as Beijing, it is the most efficient way of collecting data.

Identifying the aims of the survey is the most crucial step in questionnaire design. For better results, this paper conducts preliminary research to decide what questions shall be asked and how to collect the replies. Based on the literature review, it seemed appropriate to determine the gender of participants, how much income they have i.e. purchasing power, accessibility to the Palace Museum, etc.

As a basis, and to frame my study within the wider context of similar studies. On top of that, there will be more questions that are more specific to my research question. However, before that, this paper conducted a pilot questionnaire, using the incredible connectivity of the WeChat social media platform. Dispersing the pilot questionnaire into the group chats (each department in each university creates their own group chat) and through this process, I found the students who were interested in museum visits and contacted them to participate in further study. Eventually, this paper developed a structured questionnaire with 12 questions and collected 105 valid questionnaires.

For data collection of the questionnaire, this paper used wjx.cn, the most used Chinese web-based survey system, to gather answers. Moreover, the author sent questionnaires through personal social media to achieve a bigger sample size. As for the questions themselves, the biggest takeaway was the lack of research of university students as the subject of studies on museum visitors.

That being said, through further review, this paper found it apt to classify university students as consumers of arts and culture, therefore, when studying their behavior and motivation for visiting the Palace Museum, we are, in fact, studying their motivation for the consumption of arts and culture. As a result, you can see the questionnaire in the appendix, the questions are similar to those studying consumption patterns. The main difference lies in my method of finding participants through my pilot questionnaire, then I narrowed it down to the Palace museum itself.

The field trip is not the major research method for this paper. However, it could offer some subjective and realistic insights from the author. By personally visiting the Palace Museum several times, the author has established a vital impression on the print ads, collection quality and quantity, tourist behavior, touring route, and loads of other details. Some information would be used in the later analysis to provide a personal point of view.
Cluster Sampling

Cluster sampling refers to a probability sampling method that divides a group of participants into clusters based on certain traits in order to identify the features of the total sample by analyzing the clusters (Jackson, 2011). To gather more accurate results, each cluster shall have bigger individual differentiation and be more consistent in the individual composition.

In the case of this paper, the target group of college students is deemed to be the general group and the college students in Beijing are the cluster to be analyzed. College students in Beijing have high similarities in terms of the living environment and educational background. At the same time, because the students come from different provinces and cities, they might share distinguish values that lead to internal differences inside the cluster.

However, the selection of this cluster has certain weaknesses, that is, the application of the work outcomes especially the recommendations might be biased. The results might be better applied within more culturally developed areas such as Shanghai, Xi’an, Nanjing, and other cities where museums are already accepted by people. But for some areas where museums might still be an unfamiliar institution to people, it might require some more basic material and conceptual construction to increase the influence of museums.

3.3 Data Analysis Methods

  • Manual Coding

The process of manual coding, which consists of reviewing qualitative data or directly assigning a code in person, is sometimes considered out of date and inefficient when compared to automated coding. However, the fact is that manual coding and automated coding are each suitable for use in studies of different research objectives, sample sizes, lengths of time, budgetary scale, etc. (Basit, 2003).

Considering the relatively small sample size and rather diverse types of questions, using the manual coding method to analyze the data could provide a more personal and deeper insight into the answers while requiring less time and financial investment. The greatest advantage to the manual coding process is perhaps psychological: while it opens the door for potentially added human errors, it also forces the author to personally review each item in detail, along with the connections between them, usually more than once. This provides great personal insights and inspiration as well as helping remove more structural errors or oversight in terms of content.

  • Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics is a general term for the basic case of the amount of statistical observation to describe or summarize a given phenomenon, usually either a representation of the entire body of data or a sample of the larger set. Descriptive statistical research can illustrate how the obtained data reflects objective phenomena, and the refined data subset can then be processed and displayed in the form of graphs, which can then, in turn, have standard quantitative features extracted which reflect objective phenomena through comprehensive summarization and analysis.

This paper adopts the descriptive statistics method to facilitate the secondary processing of the questionnaire survey results, and to draw out the answers to the questions in an intuitive graphical form, so as to infer the corresponding conclusions. This not only enables the visualization of the results, which improves readability and allows for more intuitive interpretation into the survey results, it allows for the separation and grouping of the results more freely as well.