Explorations de méthodes pour la connaissance et la caractérisation de l’expérience personnelle des visiteurs non guidés au musée : Vers le développement de nouveaux outils d’analyse

Exhibition reception studies are at the heart of the museum's knowledge-sharing mission. Today, the concept of the visitor experience brings together a series of central questions on this subject: what do visitors do during their self-guided visit? How do they connect with the exhibition content? Capturing the experience as closely as possible to what visitors live in situ presents however major methodological challenges.This research is based on innovative survey methods developed over the last decades, and more particularly on REMIND, which brings together their methodological assets. REMIND is an interview method that uses the stimulated recall technique to help visitors to produce detailed descriptions of their activity in situ. Nevertheless, as the REMIND analytical framework is designed to capture the experience of each of the visitors interviewed in depth and detail, this makes it difficult to process and cross-check a large number of verbatim data. The aim of this research is to help overcome this methodological obstacle. It proposes to explore different survey and analysis methods to facilitate the systematic collection and examination of a high volume of data relating to the visiting experience. Ultimately, these methodological tools are intended to be used for comparative analyses to identify common trends in visitor activity, as well as specificities due to certain exhibition environments or visit contexts.The thesis comprises two lines of research structured around four studies focusing on the visitor experience in Belgian and French museums. The first line explores means of characterising the visitor experience based on visitors' personal constructs. Study 1 deals with the formalisation of a hybrid interview method, REMIND-Contrast, to bring out the personal constructs relating to an exhibition visit. Studies 2 and 3 propose to use these constructs as questionnaire items and test an early VX scale (Visitor eXperience) to measure the experience. The second line concerns Study 4, which uses an alternative analysis method to the REMIND framework to examine an extended corpus of interviews. This study examines visitors' activities in order to identify typical forms of engagement with exhibits.This research deploys an interdisciplinary approach to exploring field survey methods and testing analytical tools, both qualitative and quantitative, which ultimately serve to characterise the visitor experience and clarify the related phenomena. Among other things, it proposes some initial quantitative indicators to measure the visit experience in terms of key aspects for visitors. Therefore, through the perspectives offered for understanding the visitor experience, the results of this research can also nourish reflections on the evaluation and design of exhibitions and mediation devices.