Measuring What Matters: A New Tool to Measure Meaningfulness in Science Museum Visits

An ongoing challenge for museums is understanding how visitors with diverse backgrounds and perspectives create experiences that are deeply meaningful. Therefore, the Meaningful Experience Measure (MEM) was created to explore what makes a museum experience meaningful and how meaningfulness relates to other constructs such as overall satisfaction and a sense of belonging. 2630 museum visitors across six museums were surveyed. Results indicate that gender, visiting with children, visit frequency, and type of museum visited can influence a meaningful museum experience. Lastly, ratings for having a meaningful experience, sense of belonging, and overall experience are moderately related, suggesting these are distinct concepts for visitors.