Marta Šveb Dragija, Research Assistant and Daniela Angelina Jelinčić, PhD Senior Research Adviser from IRMO Department for Culture and Communication published the review article entitled „Can Museums Help Visitors Thrive? Review of Studies on Psychological Wellbeing in Museums“ in the MDPI journal Behavioral Sciences. The journal is indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, with Q1 CiteScore.
Abstract
Museums are expected to demonstrate their social value and ability to have a long-term social impact. Hence, in order to do so, museums, as experience hubs and the most-visited cultural attractions, may use their potential to offer experiences that could help visitors thrive by increasing their psychological wellbeing. Although psychological wellbeing has been a hot topic, the synthesized and holistic review of the literature on this theme, in regard to museums, has been lacking. Hence, we conducted an analysis using the PRISMA protocol to answer two research questions: (1) Can museums increase the visitor’s psychological wellbeing? (2) How can the museum experience be designed to enhance the psychological wellbeing of the visitors and how can that potentially be measured? The results showed that museums can indeed enhance visitors’ and other stakeholders’ psychological wellbeing. This can be achieved by designing museum experiences that are attractive, comfortable, comprehensible, participative, innovative, and sustainable, relying on specific detailed guidelines provided in the article. The Museum Wellbeing Toolkit serves to measure the efficiency of the proposed guidelines in stimulating the psychological wellbeing of museum visitors. If backed by wellbeing policy frameworks, museums may increase their role in fostering psychological wellbeing. As wellbeing public policies have been rather rare to date, future research may explore the effects of the existing ones to provide recommendations for new developments on the topic.
LINK:
Full text is available for download here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/12/11/458
