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Before and After: Ediacaran Fossils

The SA Museum has recently opened its refurbished Ediacaran Fossils gallery, a small permanent exhibition showing the fossilised remnants of some of the earliest multicellular animals on Earth.

I did a few accompanied visits in this gallery during the first phase of my PhD research. In this earlier iteration, the dominant colour scheme was a strong red, presumably intended to evoke the red earth of the Flinders Ranges, the outback location where the ediacaran fossils were discovered. That’s how my participants tended to see it:

“in retrospect that red colour kind of seems to connect to the area itself of the Flinders.  . .”

“Er the fossil room was very red. Was very red. But then again so’s the area where they all came from”

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A view of the original Ediacaran Fossils Gallery. The mural at the back is a large photograph of Wilpena Pound (a well-known site in the Flinders Ranges). The vertical display in the foreground is a section of what was once sea bed – abut 600 million years ago.
A view along the back wall of the original Ediacaran Fossils gallery.
A view along the back wall of the original Ediacaran Fossils gallery.

In my study, participants had different opinions on the red colour:

“I think it’s good that it’s a really strong colour because it’s very vibrant and it and it um, it makes it a really warm rich colour, and then the sense maybe that you’re actually on a cliff wall, that is like a cliff wall of where you might find things or . . .”

“. . . you sort of wonder whether it would be better off with a neutral, with neutral walls, to draw more attention to the exhibits . . . .I mean to have a red fossil wall that looks great, but then to have it in a room, I think that room was red, it sort of detracts from it a bit.”

The refurbished gallery has retained the same basic layout, but has changed the colour palette to a deep green-blue:

The refurbished fossils gallery. The Wilpena Pound image is still there, but to me felt somehow less dominant now it's in a mostly green backdrop rather than surrounded by red.
The refurbished fossils gallery. The Wilpena Pound image is still there, but to me felt somehow less dominant now it’s in a mostly green backdrop rather than surrounded by red.

I believe the rationale[1] behind the colour change was to be more evocative of what the environment would have been like when the creatures were alive (ie. the sea bed) rather than the outback setting that the area is now. This sense of being “under the sea” is enhanced by the line drawings of Dickinsonia et al up at high level. It also seems to increase the sense of height in the space.

The back wall in the refurbished gallery
The back wall in the refurbished gallery

I don’t know if it is the increased sense of height or that the back wall has been smoothed out and simplified a little, but it somehow seems more spacious in this new gallery (at least to me). It could also be that the size of the gallery, while not changing physically, has been enlarged conceptually by making what previously felt like a hallway become part of the exhibition proper.

Unfortunately I don't have a shot of the original gallery from this angle, but you can see where the lift comes out (silver doors) and the door to the stairs is at the far left. In the old gallery, the bit between the pylon and the lift/stairs felt more like a corridor as there was a window (now blocked off and turned into more display space).
Unfortunately I don’t have a shot of the original gallery from this angle, but you can see where the lift comes out (silver doors) and the doorway to the stairs is at the far left. In the old gallery, the bit between the pylon and the lift/stairs felt more like a corridor as there was a window in the far corner (now blocked off and turned into more display space). There were also some display plinths around this area that seemed to “block off” the corridor from the rest of the exhibition space.

So now, as soon as you come out of the lift/stairs, you feel like you’re in the gallery straight away rather than some ante-chamber or holding space. Blocking off the window has also dropped the light levels in this area, perhaps adding to that sense of “under the sea” immersion.

Overall I found this a calmer space to be in than the earlier iteration – they do say red is a highly arousing colour after all, and perhaps this colour scheme is a little gentler on the senses.

The new gallery has also made use of technology to help interpret the fossils, many of which can look like amorphous smudges to the untrained eye. iPad-based labels highlight the outline of the fossil imprints on the corresponding rock sections, making it easier to see what you’re looking at.

[1] Disclaimer – I had no involvement in the gallery refurbishment although I know the design team through being based at the SA Museum (also the senior designer, Brett Chandler, is a former colleague of mine and we’ve collaborated on exhibitions in the past). My commentary on the design is based on my own interpretations alone.

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Young Adults and Museums

It’s always exciting when your research data throws up something counter-intuitive. Or at least something that’s at odds with “conventional wisdom” on the subject.

One such piece of wisdom about museum visitors is that young adults (particularly those aged under 25) tend not to visit museums. Population-level statistical data tends to back this up, with a characteristic dip in the 18-24 age bracket (see this graphic from a previous post):

Attendance by age, using figures from Table 1.4 in ABS report
Heritage visitation in Australia by age. Percentage of respondents who visited a heritage site in the previous 12 months (Source: ABS)

Now, here is the age breakdown of the respondents to my visitor survey conducted at the SA Museum as part of my PhD research:

Age Range

Not only are visitors aged under 30 not under-represented, they form the biggest age group I surveyed by a considerable margin! This is a surprising (albeit incidental) finding from my research which makes me wonder what’s going on here. Based on what I observed at the Museum during my fieldwork I have come up with the following hypotheses:

  • Proximity to university campuses. The SA Museum is right next door to Adelaide University and not very far from one of the main campuses of the University of South Australia. I got into conversation with a couple of groups of young adults who indicated they were visiting the museum to kill time between lectures.
  • The backpacker factor: The SA Museum is a popular destination with both interstate and international visitors (more than half of my sample indicated they were visiting the Museum for the first time, and I would wager that the majority of these people were tourists). Among the survey sample, there appeared to be considerable numbers of young “backpacker” tourists (based on my fieldwork observations). Anecdotally, it appeared that younger international tourists were less likely to experience the language barriers of older tourists, which would have prevented them from participating in the study (about 7% of the visitors I approached to complete a survey had limited or no English).
  • Free and centrally located: a few people indicated they were in the museum because it was free to enter and a way of escaping the heat or rain. There were a couple of people who were waiting for someone with a hospital appointment (the Royal Adelaide Hospital is just down the road). Of course, they could have also spent this time in the shopping malls which are just across the road – but for some reason chose not to. So there is clearly some other characteristics of the museum that are attractive to them but which were beyond the scope of this survey. Others appear to have been ‘doing’ the precinct, visiting the Art Gallery of South Australia (next door) as well as the museum.
  • Young parents: A fair proportion of those in the 18-29 age group were accompanying young(ish) children. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I sense there has been a demographic shift between Generations X and Y. Most people of my (Gen X) vintage seemed to be well into their thirties before they settled down and started families. I suspect Gen Ys are having children younger, for a whole range of complex reasons which are beyond the scope of this post. This is just a gut feeling though – I haven’t cracked open the data.
  • Young couples: There was a surprising proportion of young (and highly demonstrative!) couples around. The museum as a date venue?
  • Patterns in the smoke: There is of course the possibility that this cluster is just a random quirk of my particular data set. However, the surveys were conducted across weekdays, weekends and public holidays (but not school holidays) to help control for variation in visiting patterns. My fieldwork observations show nothing to indicate that 18-29 year olds were more likely to agree to complete a survey than other age groups.

In retrospect, it would have been good if I’d been able to distinguish between the under and over 25s by splitting the age ranges the way the ABS do (I had a reason why I didn’t but in any case it’s no big deal). However, I went back to a pilot sample from late last year and found the age spread using different categories was broadly similar:

Pilot Age Range

So what does all this mean? I’m not sure yet. Age is not expected to be a significant variable in my own research, and I only collected very basic demographic information so I had a general sense of the survey population. I’d be interested in how this tallies with other museums though, particularly those that are free as opposed to ticketed entry. Ticketed venues tend to collect more comprehensive visitor data, and we tend to extrapolate from that. But perhaps they are not fully representative of museums as a whole?

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Survey Responses – Benchmarks and Tips

I’ve now collected a grand total of 444 questionnaires for my PhD research (not including pilot samples) – which is not far off my target sample of 450-500. Just a few more to go! Based on my experiences,  I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way . . .

Paper or Tablet?

My survey was a self-complete questionnaire (as opposed to an interviewer-led survey) that visitors filled out while on the exhibition floor. During piloting I tried both paper surveys and an electronic version on an ipad, but ended up opting for the paper version as I think the pros outweighed the cons for my purposes.

The big upside of tablet based surveys is that there is no need for manual data entry as a separate step – survey programs like Qualtrics can export directly into an SPSS file for analysis. And yes, manually entering data from paper surveys into a statistics program is time-consuming, tedious and a potential source of error. The other advantage of a tablet-based survey (or any electronic survey for that matter) is that you can set up rules that prompt people to answer questions they may have inadvertently skipped, automatically randomise the order of questions to control for ordering effects, and so on. So why did I go the other way?

First of all, time is a trade off: with paper surveys, I could recruit multiple people to complete the survey simultaneously – all I needed was a few more clipboards and pencils and plenty of comfortable seating nearby. Whereas I only had one tablet, which meant only one person could be completing my survey at a time. By the time you take into account the time saved from being able to collect far more paper surveys in a given time compared to the tablet, I think I’m still in front doing the manual data entry. Plus I’m finding doing the data entry manually is a useful first point of analysis, particularly during the piloting stages when you’re looking to see where the survey design flaws are.

Secondly, I think many visitors were more comfortable using the old-fashioned paper surveys. They could see at a glance how long the survey was and how much further they had to go, whereas this was less transparent on the ipad (even though I had a progress bar).

This doesn’t mean I would never use a tablet – I think they’d be particularly useful for interviewer-led surveys where you can only survey one participant at a time anyway, or large scale surveys with multiple interviewers and tablets in use.

Refining the recruitment “spiel”

People are understandably wary of enthusiastic-looking clipboard-bearers – after all, they’re usually trying to sell or sign you up to something. In my early piloting I think my initial approach may have come across as too “sales-y”, so I refined it such that the first thing I said was that I am a student. My gut feel is that this immediately made people less defensive and more willing to listen to the rest of my “spiel” for explaining the study and recruiting participants. Saying I was a student doing some research made it clear up front that I was interested in what they had to say, not in sales or spamming.

Response, Refusal and Attrition Rates

Like any good researcher should, I kept a fieldwork journal while I was out doing my surveys. In this I documented everyone I approached, approximately what time I did so, whether they took a participant information sheet or refused, and if they refused, what reason (if any) they gave for doing so. During busy periods, recording all this got a bit chaotic so some pages of notes are more intelligible than others, but over a period of time I evolved a shorthand for noting the most important things. The journal was also a place to document general facts about the day (what the weather was like, whether there was a cruise ship in town that day, times when large numbers of school groups dominated the exhibition floor, etc.). Using this journal, I’ve been able to look at what I call my response, refusal and attrition rates.

  • Response rate: the proportion of visitors (%) I approached who eventually returned a survey
  • Refusal rate: the proportion of visitors (%) approached who refused my invitation to participate when I approached them
  • Attrition rate: this one is a little specific to my particular survey method and wouldn’t always be relevant. I wanted people to complete the survey after they had finished looking around the exhibition, but for practical reasons could not do a traditional “exit survey” method (since there’s only one of me, I couldn’t simultaneously cover all the exhibition exits). So, as an alternative, I approached visitors on the exhibition floor, invited them to participate and gave them a participant information sheet if they accepted my invitation. As part of the briefing I asked them to return to a designated point once they had finished looking around the exhibition, at which point I gave them the questionnaire to fill out [1]. Not everyone who initially accepted a participant information sheet came back to complete the survey. These people I class as the attrition rate.

So my results were as follows: I approached a total of 912 visitors, of whom 339 refused to participate, giving an average refusal rate of 36.8%. This leaves 573 who accepted a participant information sheet. Of these, 444 (77%) came back and completed a questionnaire, giving me an overall average response rate of (444/912) 49.4%. The attrition rate as a percentage of those who initially agreed to participate is therefore 23%, or, if you’d rather, 14% of the 912 people initially approached.

So is this good, bad or otherwise? Based on some data helpfully provided by Carolyn Meehan at Museum Victoria, I can say it’s probably at least average. Their average refusal rate is a bit under 50% – although it varies by type of survey, venue (Museum Victoria has three sites) and interviewer (some interviewers have a higher success rate than others).

Reasons for Refusal

While not everyone gave a reason for not being willing to participate (and they were under no obligation to do so), many did, and often apologetically so. Across my sample as a whole, reasons for refusal were as follows:

  • Not enough time 24%
  • Poor / no English: 19%
  • Child related: 17%
  • Others / No reason given: 39%

Again, these refusal reasons are broadly comparable to those experienced by Museum Victoria, with the possible exception that my refusals included a considerably higher proportion of non-English speakers. It would appear that the South Australian Museum attracts a lot of international tourists or other non-English speakers, at least during the period I was doing surveys.

Improving the Response Rate

As noted above, subtly adjusting the way you approach and invite visitors to participate can have an impact on response rates. But there are some other approaches as well:

  • Keep the kids occupied: while parents with hyperactive toddlers are unlikely to participate under any circumstances, those with slightly older children can be encouraged if you can offer something to keep the kids occupied for 10 minutes or so. I had some storybooks and some crayons/paper which worked well – in some cases the children were still happily drawing after the parents had completed the survey and the parents were dragging the kids away!
  • Offer a large print version: it appears that plenty of people leave their reading glasses at home (or in the bag they’ve checked into the cloakroom). Offering a large print version gives these people the option to participate if they wish. Interestingly, however, some people claimed they couldn’t read even the large print version without their glasses. I wonder how they can see anything at all sans spectacles if this is the case . . . then again, perhaps this is a socially acceptable alibi used by people with poor literacy levels?
  • Comfortable seating: an obvious one. Offer somewhere comfortable to sit down and complete the questionnaire. I think some visitors appreciated the excuse to have a sit and have a break! Depending on your venue, you could also lay out some sweets or glasses of water.
  • Participant incentives: because I was doing questionnaires on the exhibition floor, putting out food or drink was not an option for me. But I did give everyone who returned a survey a voucher for a free hot drink at the Museum cafe. While I don’t think many (or any) did the survey just for the free coffee, it does send a signal that you value and appreciate your participants’ time.

[1] A potential issue with this approach is cuing bias – people may conceivably behave differently if they know they are going to fill out a questionnaire afterwards. I tried to mitigate this with my briefing, in which I asked visitors to “please continue to look around this exhibition as much or as little as you were going to anyway”, so that visitors did not feel pressure to visit the exhibition more diligently than they may have otherwise. Also, visitors did not actually see the questionnaire before they finished visiting the exhibition – if they asked what it was about, I said it was asking them “how you’d describe this exhibition environment and your experience in it”. In some cases I reassured visitors that it was definitely “not a quiz!”. This is not a perfect approach of course, and I can’t completely dismiss cuing bias as a factor, but any cuing bias would be a constant between exhibition spaces as I used comparable methods in each.