Social Identity as a Motivator in Cultural Festivals

As museums continue to broaden their offers and attract increasingly diverse audiences, it becomes ever more important to understand how motivations for visitation can vary between different cultural groups. This article explores some of the reasons people visit cultural festivals at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, combining data from 5 different festivals with a total sample of 414. The audience of these festivals contains a mix of 74% cultural community members and 26% non-community members, and their reasons for visiting the festivals differ in distinct ways. Among these distinctions, it was found that social identity played a role in why people chose to visit, especially for community members and at the festivals of communities that were relatively new to Melbourne.