The present study examined the influence of the purpose and number of museum visits on the cognitions in museum audiences. A questionnaire asking museum experience and the cognition scale of museum was administered to 301 museum audiences. A factor analysis on the data rated on cognitive scales revealed 7 interpretable factors for art-museums and 6 for general-museums. Five were common for art and general-museums, 2 unique factor for art-museums and 1 for general-museums. The factors were analyzed by ANOVA to test whether cognition was influenced by (a) frequency of visits, and (b) purpose of visits. Results for both the facilities showed that more frequency visiting person were more likely to be interested in the exhibition while persons of less frequent visits were more likely to have another interest rather than the exhibition. In addition, an ANOVA on the factor scores revealed that individuals who visited the facilities without any specific purpose tended to evaluate the amenity of the museum space. This result implies that the visitors with different intentions for visiting museum differ also in their focus.

View full abstract

What places, time zones or atmosphere provoke fear to encounter to crime (Fear of Crime)? If fear of crime appears as a result of interaction not only with human factors such as being conscious of assailants and victims but also with environmental elements that promote or repress fear of crime, it is necessary to pay attention to the environmental factors. To keep both the reality of situations, i.e., ecological validity, and the experimental control of factors examined, i.e., internal validity, this research adopted field experiment in a university campus. Participants of the experiment were 52 students who commuted to the campus, and each participant walked through there alone twice, one in the daytime and one in the nighttime, along the predesigned route. After each walk they rated 14 points along the route on 6 5-point scales. The rating scales consisted of : 1) if a potential assailant is hiding or not, 2) if prospect is enough or not, 3) if the participant can escape in encountering crime or not, 4) the number of potential strangers in the scene, 5) brightness, and 6) if they felt a fear or not. Results show first that less prospective, more decrease others' existence, more increase hiding places, and more decrease possibility of escape provoke higher fear of crime, second that darkness increase fear at night, and third that females feel more fear than males. These results support the findings of preceding studies using survey or interview. Finally, the results also imply the usefulness of field experiment in the field of fear of crime research.

View full abstract

Individuals may approach and choose environments conveying positive meanings and avoid environments conveying negative meanings. However, in actual situations individuals take constraining factors into account such as cost in terms of money, time, and effort. The present study examines the influence of the affective meaning of an environment on individuals' behaviors in actual situations where these behaviors also entail costs. 174 students rated 22 target sites with information about the time taken to commute to work and/or the rent on two scales: desire to live there and willingness-to-pay (WTP). Multiple regressions showed that the image of many places had a significant impact on both the desire and the WTP after differences in the time to commute to work and the rent were statistically eliminated. The strong correlation between the actual rents used for the desire to live model and the predicted values taking the effect of the image of a place into account proves that the actual rent reflects the image of the place to a certain degree.

View full abstract