Qualitative Methods in Tourism Research

Theory and Practice

Wendy Hillman, Kylie Radel, Wendy Hillman, Kylie Radel

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781845416423
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Hostelería, viajes y turismo

This volume seeks to expose and illustrate new approaches and thinking in qualitative methods that are being developed and implemented in tourism research. The contributions bring together various qualitative methods and approaches while also providing suggestions for the juxtaposition of qualitative and quantitative methods in mixed methods research. The book has been written with a cross-disciplinary approach which provides an insight into the art of research development from business, sociology and tourism perspectives. The chapters provide readers with a context and practical application examples for each method. They present a distinctive opportunity for social researchers from a range of disciplines, in particular tourism, to examine how to adapt the wide variety of qualitative approaches to their particular research needs.

1Ontology, Epistemology: Paradigms and Parameters for Qualitative Approaches to Tourism Research

Les Killion and Rickie Fisher

He [God] may be back one day, but until then people will seek the reassurance of a wider human context, a bigger picture in which their own walk-on role gives life meaning and significance. Everybody wants to be in a good story. It’s a natural impulse to shape the random events we live through into coherent narrative, otherwise our lives would feel like experimental theatre or abstract painting, which would be a complete bloody nightmare.

McCarthy, 2002: 48

This chapter provides some first steps in ‘thinking about’ qualitative research in general, and qualitative tourism research in particular. In writing this chapter, we made the deliberate decision to make it one of ‘broad brush strokes’, developing a general backdrop for the ‘staging’ of qualitative research. We have left it to others to add the specific details derived from their own approaches to qualitative investigations presented in the later chapters of this book. In this chapter, we aimed to provide a backdrop against which their specific investigations could be appreciated more insightfully. Structurally, the chapter revolves around a series of ‘grand tour questions’. As in ethnographic investigations, so also in this chapter ‘A grand tour question establishes a broad topic or scene…’ (Yin, 2010: 137). The grand tour questions addressed in this chapter include:

•What is qualitative research?

•What contributions can qualitative research make?

•In what ways does qualitative research differ from quantitative research?

•What relationships, interactions and tensions exist between qualitative research and quantitative research?

•What potential exists for mixed methods investigations?

•What are research paradigms and what paradigms provide the points of reference for qualitative investigators and their investigations?

•What are the key components comprising a paradigm? And, how are these different between qualitative and quantitative paradigms?

As mentioned earlier, this first encounter with terminology and underlying concepts should place you in an improved position from which you can proceed to think about the qualitative research undertaken by those investigators whose works are contained in the later chapters of this book. As you read of their endeavours, you should periodically return to the key concepts that are presented in this chapter and ask yourself questions: what was the nature and purpose of their investigations? Within the parameters of what paradigms did they locate their research? How did this choice relate to the purposes of their investigations? How did their choice of paradigm reflect in the research methods employed? And, how was the information generated from those methods analysed and presented? Before we consider these and other questions, and bearing in mind our earlier comments related to the broad-brush approach adopted in this chapter, let us turn our attention to the first of our grand tour questions: what is qualitative research?

The Nature of Qualitative Research

From any perspective, the adjective ‘qualitative’ indicates a focus on ‘qualities’ as opposed to the adjective ‘quantitative’ which implies a focus on measurements and numbers that indicate ‘quantities’. In this sense, qualitative research has a very lengthy history insofar as humans have always been curious about others; have observed others and what they may be doing; and have asked others about their lives, their attitudes, responses, reactions and ‘feelings’ about things occurring within their world as they define it. In a very ordinary sense, throughout the course of our daily lives we are all qualitative investigators. Whether such observations and conversations represent qualitative research is, however, doubtful. It is the noun ‘research’ that makes the difference. ‘Research’ has come to imply that such observations and conversations are carried out with the intention of being systematic, purposeful, disciplined, informed and rigorous and are not simply the by-products of casual everyday social interactions between individuals. However, and somewhat ironically, it may be the very same interactions that may be of central interest to a qualitative researcher.

Nonetheless, and as Erickson (2011: 43) observes, ancient scholars such as Herodotus provided the ‘precursors to qualitative social inquiry’. Erickson (2011: 43) also notes that throughout the works of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, writers and philosophers such as Isaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) contributed to the flourishing of ‘descriptive reporting of everyday social practices’. However, much of this was to change as the Enlightenment unfurled its positivist flag over human enquiry throughout the 17th century.

The Enlightenment, heralded as it was by the works of thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton among others witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘scientific’ approach to inquiry. In particular, this saw a growing emphasis placed on the measurement and enumeration of phenomena and the search for universal laws founded on causal relationships. In essence, quantitative approaches and measures began to provide the yardsticks that were used to determine whether an investigation met the rigorous standards and criteria of being ‘scientific’. With universal laws being expounded within the physical and life sciences, some turned their attention to the possibility of formulating comparable universal laws applicable to the social world. Auguste Comte, whom some regard as the ‘founding father’ of the discipline of sociology, sought, for instance, to postulate a science of society that mirrored the earlier developments of causal laws in disciplines such as physics and chemistry which, even today, are still often referred to as the ‘hard sciences’ (along with, of course, mathematics). In the same period, Quetelet, a contemporary of Comte, advocated the use of statistics in social research as a basis for what he referred to as ‘social physics’ (Erickson, 2011: 44).

While the hegemony of the ‘scientific’ positivist quantitative approach was (and continues to be) deeply influential and long lasting, there were some investigators who questioned its wisdom in providing a platform from which social phenomena could be understood. Among these, as Erickson (2011) points out, was the German social philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey who argued that the approaches to the natural sciences were not suited to the study of people and human society. In his conceptualising of what he referred to as Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the spirit) (Erickson, 2011), Dilthey claimed that the social or human sciences were more focused on ‘the particulars of meaning and action taken in everyday life. The purpose of inquiry in the human sciences was understanding (verstehen) rather than proof or prediction’ (Erickson, 2011: 44). It was the notion of verstehen, or empathetic understanding that influenced the thoughts of Max Weber who, along with philosophers such as Simmel, Husserl and Geertz among others, was to refocus social inquiry to acknowledge the contributions of qualitative investigations seeking to understand the realities of social life in all of its varieties, contexts and situations.

We do not need to belabour the historical development of qualitative inquiry any further save to share the observations made by Denzin and Lincoln (2011) that:

Any definition of qualitative research must work within this complex historical field. Qualitative research means different things … Nonetheless, an initial, generic definition can be offered. Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. Qualitative research consists of a set of interpretive, materials practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including fieldnotes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. At this level, qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011: 3)

In somewhat more direct terms, Erickson (2011) says that:

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what their actions mean to them. It identifies meaning-relevant kinds of things in the world – kinds of people, kinds of actions, kinds of beliefs and interests – focusing on differences in forms of things that make a difference for meaning. (Erickson, 2011: 43)

Qualitative vs Quantitative Research

Unsurprisingly, the developments over time in how humans collect, analyse and generalise information and contribute to knowledge opened a still persistent chasm and, at times, hotly contested territory between and among purist qualitative and quantitative investigators. Denzin and Lincoln (2011: 1–2) talk in terms of conflict and ‘paradigm wars’, arguing that ‘the academic and disciplinary resistances to qualitative research illustrate the politics embedded in this field of discourse’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011: 2). The reasons for such conflict can be attributed to the fact that ‘these political and procedural resistances reflect an uneasy awareness that the interpretive traditions of qualitative research commit one to a critique of the positivist or post-positivist project’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011: 2). As they see it, the conflicts between qualitative and quantitative approaches arise from the perception (on the part of positivists) that qualitative research is an assault on the traditions of positivist ‘sciences’ seen, at least by some, to be ‘the crowning achievements of Western civilisation’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011: 2). ‘Positivists’, suggest Denzin and Lincoln (2011: 2), ‘allege that the so-called new experimental qualitative researchers write fiction, not science, and have no way of verifying their truth statements’. And further, ‘often … politicians and hard scientists call qualitative researchers journalists or “soft” scientists. Their work is termed unscientific, only exploratory, or subjective. It is called criticism and not theory, or it is interpreted politically, as a disguised version of Marxism or secular humanism’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011: 2). Denzin and Lincoln (2011: 2) depict such critics as [presuming] ‘a stable, unchanging reality that can be studied with the empirical methods of objective social science’. The following scenario developed by Denzin and Lincoln encapsulates much of what qualitative research is seen to be, and the challenges presented by the ongoing conflicts and paradigm wars between qualitative and quantitative investigators:

The qualitative research community consists of groups of globally dispersed persons who are attempting to implement a critical interpretive approach that will help them (and others) make sense of the terrifying conditions that define daily life at the first decade of this new century. These individuals employ constructivist, critical theory, feminist, queer and critical race theory, as well as cultural studies models of interpretation. They locate themselves on the borders between post-positivism and post-structuralism. They use any and all of the research strategies (case study, ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, biographical, historical, participatory and clinical) … As interpretive bricoleurs, the members of this group are adept at using all of the methods of collecting and analysing empirical materials … And, as writers and interpreters, these individuals wrestle with positivist, post-positivist, post-structural and postmodern criteria for evaluating their written work. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011: xii)

In terms of qualitative approaches to tourism research, the conflicts between qualitative and quantitative approaches have ramifications. Jennings (2010) and others have observed that much of what we know as tourism research has been dominated by the quantitative research following positivist traditions to gather numeric data concerning such phenomena as numbers of visitors and some of their demographics, their length of stay, patterns of seasonality, dimensions of expenditure and revenue multiplier effects and so on. It was not until the 1970s or thereabouts that qualitative investigators began to make their contributions to tourism research. However, then, and in some cases now, the potential contributions of qualitative research to add greater depth, detail and understanding of a wide range of tourism-related phenomena were under-valued, under-rated and often seen as ‘second rate’. One did q...