The Behavioral Pattern of Chinese Public Cultural Participation in Museums

Studying the cultural participation model of the public and its influencing factors is important for the sustainable development of regional culture. Therefore, in this study, we determined which factors influence the cultural participation of the Chinese public. Firstly, we extracted the key features of the motivation and timing for a museum visit with multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), and explored the relationship of the features of different motivations with the frequency and duration of the public’s visits to the museum. Secondly, we determined the monotonicity of the influence of ordinal variables on cultural participation behavior and identified the mechanism through which the independent variable influences public cultural participation with categorical regression (CATREG). Finally, we analyzed the research data from the museum audience survey in the Hubei Provincial Museum and a national public culture participation survey. We found that education, occupation, academic discipline, income, distance, age, and sex affect the public’s museum participation. This indicates that to guarantee the public’s cultural rights and promote sustainable development, education, planning, and other aspects must be coordinated in cultural management to increase public cultural participation, rather than removing the economic threshold for public cultural participation through public finances alone.