The Study of the Exhibition of the Discovery Center of Taipei and Adult Visitors’ Behavior.

[[abstract]]“The Discovery Center of Taipei” provides various types of exhibitions for visitors to interact with to present the history and life facts of Taipei. In Taiwan, the majority of master’s theses related to the audience behavior took the scientific type of museum as a research area; only few researches focuses on social historical type of museums. The purpose of this study is to explore the exhibitions and the adult visitors’ behavior in “The Discovery Center of Taipei” in order to improve the exhibitions of social history museums. This study took the “Dialogue with Time Hall” at The Discovery Center of Taipei as the research area between March to May 2008. This study used content analysis in the exhibition aspect and also used nonparticipant observation and semi-structured interview to get the attracting power and holding power of adult visitors for each exhibition. Adult visitors’ behavior is understood, too. The findings of this study are: (1) There are some relationships between the attracting power and holding power of exhibitions. (2) Different exhibitions affect attracting power and holding power. The exhibitions which adult visitors can interact with or provide highly sense stimulate can get higher attracting power and holding power. (3) Different type of exhibit strategies attract different kind of adult visitors. (4) Adult visitors’ behavior is mostly in the visual behavior, and is influenced by personal, social and physical contexts. According to the findings, this study makes the following suggestions： (1) At the suggestions to the practice: to satisfy the need of adult visitors; to value adult visitors’ learning characters in museums; to improve the cues to hint adult visitors to interact with the exhibitions; to maintain the operation of the international exhibitions. (2) At the suggestions to the future researches: to gain quantification data to explore the adult visitors’ demographic characteristics and preferences and to broaden the research scope to social history museums.