Testing the Uses and Gratifications Approach to Museum Visiting: Adopting a Mediated Perspective in the Cultural Domain

This article examines the motivations of museum visitors and some of the primary needs they seek to satisfy in their contact with museums. The authors used a survey conducted in three regional museums of the island of Lesvos in Greece to establish a hierarchy of visitor gratifications. The survey included questions about demographic information and asked visitors to rank their motives when visiting the museums. It was filled in by 416 visitors and was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that cultural and educational gratifications were significant motivations for visitation and were ranked higher than entertainment or escape motivations. Ηaving a “cultural experience” was the primary reason visitors stated for visiting the museums. The study used a regression model to understand how the concept of cultural experience relates to demographic, educational, and motivational elements.