Visit motivations: development of a short scale for comparison across sites

Motivations for visiting educational leisure settings (ELS) are a lasting research focus for academics and museum practitioners alike. Insights into visit motivations have proven valuable in drawing audiences, creating satisfying experiences and for better understanding visitors’ learning processes. However, the lack of an instrument offering a reasonable degree of measurement invariance to use across sites has challenged attempts to make valid comparisons across different types of ELS. We therefore developed a short scale to enable quick and valid comparisons of visit motivations across ELS and investigated its dimensionality, reliability and measurement invariance across three sites (science museum, art museum, zoo; N = 605). Our 17-item short scale captures six theoretically important visit motivation categories with sufficient reliability (ρ. 65 <.85). Analysis indicates an approximate scalar invariance of factor loadings and item intercepts, allowing for a comparison of latent factor means across sites. Subsequently, we found plausible mean differences in visit motivation dimensions across ELS, providing preliminary evidence that the scale enables meaningful comparisons across sites.