Abstract

As ageing society rapidly unfolds, it is becoming an even more important issue to secure wellbeing and happiness of senior citizens and the society as a whole. Growing talks on how culture and art positively affect the elderly led to more demands from the public on culture and art institutions to increase their social participations. Art museums too, as an art and cultural institution and a social education entity, are requested to play a bigger role in the effort to tackle the concerns derived from the ageing society. Korean art museums came up with senior programs since 2000, which makes it a relatively recent phenomenon. The consensus on the importance and needs of such programs has been around for a while in our society. However, effect measurement of these programs needs further research and discussion. This thesis examined the effect of senior programs using the Museum Wellbeing Measures Toolkit published in 2013. With the service quality research model, correlations were analyzed among program components, wellbeing effect, participant satisfaction and their willingness to re-enroll in order to produce a practical guidance on how to plan and operate the programs. To measure effect of senior programs and to analyze influencing factors would provide us with important data to prove the social responsibility and benefit art museums offer in our society. At the same time, such researches would contribute to enhancing the quality of current programs run by museums and give methodological suggestions on how to assess and improve senior programs.