Social Interaction and Visitor Experience at Living Museum: A Case Study in Sarawak Cultural Village

This study aims to evaluate the social interaction between visitors and its’ effect on the formation of the visitor experience at Sarawak Cultural Village (SCV). Four groups of visitors with three to four members per group aged between 18 to 60 years old were involved. Voice recording, interview and photovoice technique were employed for data collection. Voice recording was used to record the visitors’ conversations during their visit and was analysed using Representative Dialogic segment (RDs) to identify the interaction behaviour within the group visit. The photovoice technique required visitors to take photographs of points of interest during their visit. Subsequently, an interview was conducted at the end of the visitors’ visit to get their opinions on SCV, their visiting experiences and their comments on the photographs taken. The features of the visitor experience was identified using the audio recording and compared with interview transcripts and photographs taken using thematic analysis. The result shows that two types of interaction behaviour exist in participants’ visit at SCV, which are inquiry skills and dialogic episodic. Inquiry skills include questioning, interpreting, observing, and comparing while dialogic episodic are asking, explaining, arguing, naming and answering. In addition, 28 different subthemes were found and were categorized into the four types of visitor experience at museum, which are social experiences, cognitive experiences, object experiences, and introspective experiences