Nicola,

I am putting the finishing touches on my dissertation and will be defending on
April 20th. I used an online survey that was an adaptation of Marilyn Hood's
research on why people visit or don't visit a museum.

With an N of 348 usable responses, some of the demographics:

The Age Range of Survey Respondents

Mean    Std Dev   Variance   Range   Minimum   Maximum

41.08   14.05     197.33     74.00      6        80

The Ages of Respondents by Gender.
                Mean      Std Dev   Variance    Cases

All            41.0843    14.0473   197.3252      344

Female         37.0154    12.7887   163.5501      130
Male           43.5561    14.2290   202.4640      214


More men (62.1%) than women (37.9%) completed this survey (Table 3). Once
again, the results are consistent with the findings of the most recent GVU
survey where 38.5 percent of the respondents in that survey were female.

Approximately 10% of the respondents indicated they were planning a tour of the
museum or the area. Most respondents indicated that the most satisfying part of
visiting Web sites is the content. Second is the ability to plan a tour. A
distant third is graphics and animation.

Of those who responded to the question, 196, or 56.3%, consider content most
important as shown in Figure 10, regardless of their museum visitation habits.
In the other categories, 74 respondents, or 21.3%, indicated that the Web site
was useful to plan a visit to the Museum and 21 respondents, or 6%, indicated
that the design of the Web site was most important.

A couple of interesting things. Those with a high level of interest spend more
time at the Web site than those with a lower level of interest in the subject
matter. People visiting the Web site as part of a group accessed more files
than those visiting alone although there was not a significant difference in
time spent visiting between the two groups.

Hope this helps a little bit.

john chadwick
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