Enhancing Cultural Sustainability in Ethnographic Museums: A Multi-Dimensional Visitor Experience Framework Based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This study looks at multi-dimensional visitor experience at ethnographic museums, and as I have researched museums in the past, including something related to tangible/intangible factors in a museum exhibition. I found it an interesting study.

Overall I thought it was an interesting study with a strong theoretical background and raises some good issues on visitor experience.

Some areas that need some work include:

• the paper needs clear Research Questions/ Problem/Objectives that will guide the paper, while it indicates generally what it is doing, this should be more explicit;
• check the writing, eg one place it says 125 surveyed, then 100 useable, and then later 25 respondents. If there were only 25 respondents I would be more concerned about the analysis. Things like this need to be clear and consistent throughout.
• More information on the respondents would be helpful.
• The authors should more strongly state the contributions of the research and how it advances the body of knowledge. What makes this study special?

I wish the authors good luck with their study.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your valuable feedback on our manuscript. We recognize that there are several areas requiring substantial revision, and we appreciate the time and effort you have put into reviewing our work. Attached are our responses to each issue, along with a clear plan for addressing the suggested changes.

Yours sincerely,
Chao Ruan, Suhui Qiu, Hang Yao

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

I read your research in detail. It can be concluded that the research idea, goal, methodology, and results are significant for the wider scientific community of researchers. Although your research has many qualities, the manuscript needs to be adjusted to make it even more qualitative and the details more reasonable for many readers, because your manuscript will have a lot of citations. I'm sure of that.

The following needs to be changed:

1. The acronym AHP is not a widely known term. Therefore, it is not recommended to use such an acronym in writing titles. Please restore the full meaning of this acronym.
2. You need to expand the abstract to explain the methodology and significant results.
3. You need to significantly shorten the Literature Review Chapter. It is important to focus attention on the research results that served in defining the research model. It will be important for the Discussion chapter. Chapter 2.4. AHP Judgment Model Explanation and POE Theory, it is necessary to focus only on important theoretical foundations, shorten the chapter and integrate it into the rest of the text without chapter titles. Lines: 243-337.
4. It is necessary to indicate the source of the data after Table 1 and to write a short description of the displayed information.
5. It is necessary to indicate the source of the data after Table 2 and to write a short description of the displayed information.
6. It is necessary to form a separate table in which it will be shown which museums participated in the study as part of the research subject. That would give great importance to this study, in Paragraph 3. Materials and Methods. Museums can be displayed by province.
7. The Materials and Methods chapters are adequately written and provide a clear insight into the chosen methodology and method of data collection for analysis.
8. You need to edit all the tables according to the Author's Template.
9. In the Results Chapter, it is necessary to clearly describe the results of the research questions, which are the goal of the research. Also, it is necessary to make a comparative analysis with the previous results. After that, state what innovations are the results of your study.
10. In the paragraph, line 462, briefly describe the scale for ranking the results in SPSS and indicate the confidence level of the results you used.
11. The references you have used are relatively recent and adequate for your study. You need to edit the references according to the Author's Template.

Good luck with your future work!

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your valuable feedback on our manuscript. We recognize that there are several areas requiring substantial revision, and we appreciate the time and effort you have put into reviewing our work.

 Attached are our responses to each issue, along with a clear plan for addressing the suggested changes.

Yours sincerely,
Chao Ruan, Suhui Qiu, Hang Yao

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The presented manuscript provides and interesting read and tackles a problem that wasn’t addressed previously in such form. It uses an interesting approach where AHP is combined with POE and the EET model. However, there some issues that should be addressed:

First sentence: the main object being the object – this could be phrased better without repetition. The whole text should be checked for spelling and grammar errors.

Lines 53, 63, 72, 84, 92, 348, 365, 377,384, 391, 503, 512, 518, 522, 534,540, 545, 561,585, 603, 613, 626, 649, 657,666, – they’re blank lines, that should be removed.

Figure 1: There are some spelling errors in the top layer (like “Aestherics”), the last box is unreadable” The whole figure would benefit from remaking it in higher resolution and with larger fonts that match the size of the font in the manuscript.

The sample size and structure is questionable, as it only focuses on young people (as the manuscript says this group was “most” of the participants). Therefore, the results can not be generalized for the entire population. This should be clearly underlined in the limitations description. For clarity I also suggest to show a table with basic statistic for the sample, like  share of each age group, gender, education etc, from the basic demographic section from the questionnaire. Because the questionnaire sample was only 100 participants, assuming a confidence level at α = 0,95, the maximum sample error is as high as 10%. Then in line 448 it is written that there were 25 valid questionnaires? Was this the same questionnaire as before, and only a quarter of the gained responses were valid? If so, the maximum error would be 20%. Or was is a separate group. I ask this, because  because the materials and methods section says something about 125 participants, from which 100 responded the questionnaire – the whole description in present form is confusing and unclear. Is should be explained in more detail.

As mentioned by the authors the AHP method assumes independence between criteria, whereby the museum experience is multidimensional and interdependent. My question is then why instead of applying the merge of qualitative and quantitative data the authors did not use the ANP approach, that seems more suited in this context?

I appreciate the authors' efforts in addressing a meaningful topic and applying a novel methodological approach. I hope that these comments will help improve the manuscript and bring it to a publishable standard without reservation.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We sincerely thank you for your detailed and insightful comments on our manuscript. Your suggestions are highly appreciated and have helped us substantially improve the quality, clarity, and academic rigor of the paper.

Attached are our responses to each issue, along with a clear plan for addressing the suggested changes.

Yours sincerely,
Chao Ruan, Suhui Qiu, Hang Yao

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

We appreciate your efforts to improve your manuscript!

Best wishes!

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Hereby I would like to thank the authors for taking all my suggestions into consideration. The current form of the manuscript is of good quality and in my opinion meets the reqired standards for publication. Therefore I congratulate the authors and wish them further sucesses with upcoming publications. Should there be an opportunity to put minor improvements to the paper, I would suggest using dashes (-) in the top row of boxes in figure 1, for proper line breaks in the words, or just flip the text by 90 degrees.

Best of luck,