Capire la frequentazione dei musei d’arte. Approcci metodologici

Understanding art museum visiting. Some methodological approaches - The works of research summarized here try, each with a different focus and methodology, to contribute to a better understanding of why some people do visit art museums and some do not. In the first piece of research we used in-depth interviews to compare people whose sociological characteristics are in favor of their being museum visitors, yet some of them do not attend art museums while others do; we did the same investigation on people with unfavorable sociological characteristics. In the second one, we took into account, through the review of existing research, all the sociological and psychological variables likely to play a role in museum visiting. A great number of questionnaires was necessary to use appropriate statistical analysis to compare the influence of the different variables. In the third one we focused on the distance between one’s self-image and one’s image of museum visitors as predictive of art museum visits. Keywords Art museums, museum visitors, motivations, social representations, personality characteristics.