Exploring Parent-Child Conversation about Challenging Content in a Natural History Museum

1. Introduction The Mysterious Bog People Exhibit Results: Impact of Parent Comfort on Exhibit Rating Methods cont. Results: Parent Expectations and Concerns Purpose Conclusions Results: Self-Reported Comfort Levels Exploring Parent-Child Conversation about Challenging Content in a Natural History Museum Andrea R. Patterson University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments Parents who reported discussing challenging content with their children while in the exhibit on average reported higher comfort levels, on a 7-point scale, with those topics than parents who reported not discussing those topics with their children. • There is an emerging trend in today’s natural history museums towards exhibits that display challenging or controversial content. A museum setting may allow visitors to learn and discuss controversial material without being constrained by the emotions that are often linked to these issues in the world outside of the museum. Since families make up a large percentage of the visitor population to natural history museums it is important to understand how parents and children explore these types of exhibits together and what factors may enhance or impede their exploration. While visiting a museum, parents and children engage with each other in conversation and shared activities (Crowley et al., 2002). The teaching behavior displayed by parents may be affected by how comfortable they feel with the content that is presented in an exhibit (Gelman, Massey, & McManus, 1991). The current study was conducted at the Mysterious Bog People exhibit, which features challenging content such as death and dying, human remains, forensics, and ritual sacrifices. Procedure • Families were recruited, asked to sign informed consent and surveyed before and after visiting the Mysterious Bog People exhibit • The pre-exhibit survey included questions that measured demographics, parent expectations and concerns for the exhibit, and what, if anything, the parent did to prepare their child for viewing this exhibit • The post-exhibit survey included questions about what topics parents had discussed with their children prior to attending the exhibit. Also included on the survey were five 7-point Likert scales, which were used to measure the overall rating of the exhibit and how comfortable the parent felt with discussing challenging content: death and dying, human remains, forensics, rituals or sacrifices. Coding • The responses to open-ended questions were grouped into mutually exclusive categories. Open-ended questions could receive more than one code per response. The yes/no questions were given a single code. • The four Likert scales that were used to measure parent comfort were averaged together to achieve an overall comfort level score for discussing challenging content. *p = .04 **p = .023 Comfort with Content by Parent Engagement • To identify the relationship between a parent’s reported comfort level towards a topic and whether the parent reports discussing that topic while visiting this exhibit • To investigate the questions and concerns that parents have about viewing an exhibit with challenging content with their children Parents who were found to have a high overall comfort level with challenging content reported enjoying the exhibit significantly more (p = .002) than parents who were found to have a low overall comfort level with challenging content. Before attending the exhibit, three of the five most common concerns mentioned by parents involved questions about the bog people and viewing the human remains. • The Mysterious Bog People is a traveling exhibition that features mummies and artifacts that were discovered in the bogs of Northern Europe. Due to the preservation powers of the bog, the seven featured bog bodies have maintained remnants of their hair, flesh, and fingernails. Another distinct characteristic of the bog mummies are that they all suffered violent deaths, possibly as a result of religious rituals or criminal acts. Exhibit Rating by Overall Parent Comfort Concerns about Content of the Exhibit • Parents enter the exhibit aware of the challenging content that exists and many parents have discussed challenging content with their children prior to attending the exhibit • Level of comfort of the parent has a profound impact on whether or not parents discuss challenging content with their children while visiting a museum exhibit • Level of comfort of the parent also impacts how much parents report enjoying their exhibit experience • Additional data was collected on the content and discourse of family conversations at the exhibit. This data is in the process of being analyzed. After attending the exhibit, the majority of parents reported that they had discussed at least one of the challenging content topics with their child prior to attending the exhibit. “Red Franz” Reconstructed face of “Red Franz” “Yde Girl” Methods Participants • 34 families with at least one child between the ages of 8-12 • 17 boys & 17 girls • All participants were weekend visitors to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, PA The author would like to thank the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Canadian Museum of Civilization for providing access to the Mysterious Bog People exhibit. Additional thanks goes to Kevin Crowley, Debra Bernstein, and Sasha Palmquist for their help and guidance with this project. Content Discussed Outside of the Museum