Measuring Fun and Enjoyment of Children in a Museum: Evaluating the Smileyometer

Measuring fun and enjoyment with children is not trivial. Subjective measures are known to suffer from an experimenter effect and often lack detail in their answering. The experimenter effect refers to answering in accordance with the expectations of the experimenter rather than reflecting the opinion of the subject. The lack of detail in answering is due to the oft-found finding (which we will illustrate in this paper as well) that children tend to select the extremes of a scale: either very high or very low, leaving out more fine-grained possibilities. Markopoulos et al. (2008) [1] treat related issues ‘satisficing’ and ‘suggestibility’ as important issues to deal with when using survey methods with children. Suggestibility refers to the influence of the experimenter that is generally expected to be more important for children than for adults because of age differences. A respondent that is satisficing gives more or less a superficial answer that appears reasonable without carefully considering the question and the answer options. With children satisficing can easily occur when they find the questions difficult to understand.