Research Approaches

Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) Interviews

Personal meaning map interviews are used to understand learning and visitor experiences in museums and other free-choice learning contexts – typically to compare pre- and post-visit museum knowledge and learning (Falk et al., 1998; Falk & Dierking, 2000). Twenty to thirty visitors will be asked to complete a personal meaning map of their learning related to the Journey to Churchill exhibit and they will then be interviewed about what they wrote or drew. This process will be completed a second time immediately after the Journey to Churchill visit (at the Tundra Café) to measure pre-post differences in learning related to the exhibit. The personal meaning map interviews will last approximately 10-15 minutes.

Overheard Conversations

Overheard conversations is an unobtrusive method to capture a wide array of visitors’ responses to free-choice learning sites such as museums, zoos, and aquariums (Tofield et al., 2003).  This method has been applied in museums (Leinhardt & Knutson, 2004) and zoos (Clayton, Fraser, & Saunders, 2009; Tunnicliffe, 1996a; Tunnicliffe, 1996b; Tunnicliffe, 1998). ‘Listening in’ is undertaken in several different ways. The least intrusive method to ‘overhear conversations’ that still captures diverse conversations is listening in and noting conversation content in written form (Clayton et al., 2009). The student research assistant will position herself in the visitor areas in different parts of the Journey to Churchill exhibit to overhear and note conversations regarding the exhibit, signage, and other forms of communication to visitors, and the animals. Conversations that are not related to the exhibit, signage, or animals will not be noted. Should a visitor notice or comment on the observations going on, noting will cease.

Social Media Analysis

A content analysis of publicly available social networking sites’ posts will be undertaken to examine interpretive, emotional, and behavioural objectives. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will be the social media sites consulted. A content analysis of these sites will be undertaken after the on-site data collection and will review content from the week before the Journey to Churchill exhibit opened (June, 2014) until the commencement of the data collection. No user names seen on the social networking sites will be recorded or included in the study.