Approaches to leisure and tourism research

Approaches to leisure and tourism research

Approaches to leisure and tourism research • Introduction : discipline and paradigms for leisure and tourism research • The disciplinary traditions of leisure and tourism research : Sociology, Economics, Psychology/social psychology, History and anthropology, Political science • Cross-disciplinary dimensions

The disciplinary traditions of leisure and tourism research • Leisure and tourism studies is a multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary field of study. • Multi-disciplinary : a number of disciplines are used • Cross-disciplinary : issues, theories, concepts and methods which are common to more than one discipline are involved • Inter-disciplinary : sub-fields of research which do not fit neatly into any particular discipline are involved

An inter-disciplinary framework • Five main elements: people, organizations, services/facilities/attractions, the linkages between these three elements, the physical environments within which everything takes place • Link A : market research and political activity Link B : marketing, buying, selling, employing, visiting/using services Link C : planning and investment

An inter-disciplinary framework • Disciplines vary in terms of their primary focus of attention • psychology and social psychology : people • Political science : organizations • History : whole system • Economics at the macro-level : whole system • Economics at the micro-level : market process • Sociology : people and Link A and organizations • It is impossible to gain complete appreciation of the research contribution and methods of any discipline without understanding the discipline as a whole.

Sociology • Questions Why do men tend to play sport than women? Why do middle-class, highly educated people make greater use of arts facilities and outdoor recreation areas than other groups? etc. • Sociology of leisure • Social surveys and quantitative models - Sociology is concerned with explaining or understanding social behaviors - particularly the behavior of groups or classes of people.

Sociology - The surveys contributes to the policy process. - This research is quantitative, being highly statistical and concerned primarily with predicting numbers of participants and visits. - The modeling/prediction approach did not work well but more theoretical framework of sociology is needed. • Explaining why - Focus on the value of sociological theory and the use of qualitative as well as quantitative evidence. - Want to know why and what leisure and lack of leisure meant to people. - A number of areas were explored including existential approaches to leisure, the benefits approach and leisure constraints.

Sociology • Critical approaches - Neo-Marxist research introduced the agency/structure debate into leisure studies. - Feminist sociologist noted that the empirical work to date had been based on samples of men and ignored the day-to-day experience of freedom of women. - Postmodernism moves parts of leisure sociology closer to humanities approach. - Poststructuralism rejects structural theory of society but seeks to focus on the micro-level of human existence and the ways individuals and groups interact to create social environments and power relationships.

Sociology • Sociology of tourism - Equivalent to recreation research. - No single sociology of tourism instead, there have been several attempts to understand sociologically different aspects of tourism, departing from a number of theoretical perspectives. - Paralleling developments in theory has been the development of empirical research on tourism to encompass a spread of methodologies from the highly quantitative and deductive to the full range of qualitative and inductive approaches.

Geography • Questions: What is the relationship between where people live, their access to leisure facilities and their patterns of leisure participation? How are the leisure and tourism trips of the population of a region accommodates and distributed within the region? etc. • What geographers do in leisure and tourism research - Social modeling is extended to spatial modeling.

Geography - Concerned primarily with spatial and environmental issues and also with large-scale natural and man-made phenomena such as the coastline, wilderness and human settlement patterns. e.g.) research about tourism sites, recreation in ‘green’ areas such as urban and national parks. - Overlapping with sociology and bridging the gap between leisure and tourism. - Covering a full range of qualitative and quantitative research methods into field. - Demonstrating the use of aerial photography in examining the spatial distribution of recreational resources and utilization and the ways visitors make use of dispersed sites such as parks.

Economics • Questions How do increase in incomes affect leisure expenditure and behavior? What is the impact in terms of business turnover and jobs, of an event such as the Olympic Games? How will a change in the exchange rate affect international tourist arrivals?

Economics • Economic study - Concerned with the public sector, particularly rural outdoor recreation and the arts whose economic valuation are evaluated and a great deal of research on ‘cost-benefit analysis’ is spawned. - Focus on macro-economics including levels of economic output, multipliers, unemployment, international trade and etc. - Work on the economics of professional sport. - Produce forecasts of domestic and overseas tourist trips based on primarily economic models. - Use similar methods to other social scientists, including household and site interviews as well as accessing to more government-collected data such as consumer expenditure.

Psychology/social psychology • Questions What satisfaction do people obtain from their leisure? What motivates people to engage in one form of leisure activity rather than another? • Psychology study - Attempt to understand the underlying motivations of individuals as well as their social interaction.

Psychology/social psychology - Four main categories of psychological research • motivation and needs (why individuals do what they do) • satisfactions (the idea that ‘particular types of leisure behavior and experience lead to differential levels of satisfaction’) • leisure as a state of mind (including Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’) • individual differences (including gender, age, personality and cultural differences)

Psychology/social psychology • Five types of psychological research of tourism • physiological and ergonomic (e.g. jet-lag and travelers’ health problems) • cognition (e.g. the use of maps and tourists’ ‘mindfulness’ of areas visited) • individual differences approaches ( e.g. relationships between personality types and types of touristic experience sought, links with motivation, psychographics and need)

Psychology/social psychology • social psychology (including intra-individual, inter-individual and group processes) • environmental studies (e.g. perception of crowding) - The small-scale self-completion questionnaire surveys dominate the methods of leisure and tourism psychology-related research.

History and anthropology • Questions What are the historical roots of the practices, attitudes and institutions involved in contemporary leisure and tourism? To what extent has leisure time increased since pre-industrial times? How is change constrained by the effects of past actions and events?

History and anthropology • Historians and theorists have produces histories of leisure, particularly in the 19th century, which show how leisure has been an integral part of the development of the cultures and economies of Western capitalist societies. • The available historical writing tends to jump from ancient Greece to the industrial revolution in Europe. • One of major contributions of historical analysis is to illustrate the use of secondary data sources such as diaries, official records and reports and newspaper reports. • Anthropological research methods emerges as ‘cultural studies’ in the form of ethnographical methods.

Political Science • Despite the importance of public policy matters in leisure and tourism, the political dimension of the subject was ignored for many years. • Case studies of the politics of local decision-making have emerged as an important contribution in recent years. • While leisure studies research has focused on the relationships between political ideology and leisure policy, in tourism the focus is less ideological and more to do with the role of tourism in political behavior.

Approaches and dimensions • Theoretical/applied • Empirical/non-empirical • Induction/deduction • Descriptive/explanatory research • Positivist/interpretive • Experimental/non-experimental • Primary/secondary data • Self-reported/observed • Qualitative/quantitative • Validity and reliability

Theoretical and applied research Theoretical approach • Draw general conclusions about the phenomena being studied • Develop or elaborate the model in general • Create wholly new knowledge Applied approach • Apply existing theoretical knowledge to particular problems or issues • Policy studies, planning and management can be seen applied disciplines • Use the model as a framework for examining a problem

Empirical vs. non-empirical Empirical approach • Involve the collection and/or analysis of data • Informed by observations or information from the ‘real world’ but usually informed by some sort of theory or conceptual framework • Provide some of ‘building blocks’ of research and knowledge Non-empirical approach • Theoretical research with no reference to information about the ‘real world’ is likely to be of limited value • Non-empirical contributions are needed to review and refine ideas and to place the empirical work in context It is rare for any research to be purely empirical or purely theoretical. Typically theoretical and empirical research coexist and enhance each other.

Induction vs. deduction B. Analysis • Observation/ • Description C. Explanation/ Hypothesis/Theory

Induction vs. deduction • Inductive • Begin at point A • Proceed to point B • Arrive at point C • The explanation is induced from the data. • The data come first and the explanation later. • Deductive • Begin at point C, with a hypothesis • Proceed to point A, gathering data to test the hypothesis • Proceed to point B, to test the hypothesis against the data • Based on prior logical reasoning

Induction vs. deduction Case study 2.1 : Explain the relative popularity of tennis vs. golf • Inductive approach • Descriptive survey : more people play tennis than play golf • Why? It costs more to play golf than to play tennis. More people consider tennis as being fun to play than consider golf to be fun. There are more tennis courts available than golf courses. Price, intrinsic enjoyment and supply of facilities

Induction vs. deduction • Deductive approach • Hypothesis 1 : if sport A is more expensive to play than sport B, then sport B will be more popular than sport A. • Hypothesis 2 : If more facilities are available for sport B than for sport A, then sport B will be more popular than sport A. • To test these hypotheses, collect information on • The level of participation in the two sports – tennis and golf • The costs of participating in the two sports • The availability of facilities for the two sports in the study area

Induction vs. deduction • Comment: Data rarely collected without some explanatory model in mind and it is not possible to develop hypothesis without at least some initial information on subject. Therefore, most research is partly inductive and partly deductive.

Descriptive vs. explanatory • Descriptive research aims to describe what is. • Explanatory research involves establishing that one phenomenon is caused by another. This raises the question of causality: whether A is caused by B. e.g. A tourism destination is losing market. Why? price movement or inefficient marketing?

Descriptive vs. explanatory • Criterions for establishing causality • Association: necessary condition for a causal relation • Time priority: Cause must take place before the result • Nonspurious relation: the association between two variables that cannot be explained by a third variable • Rationale: statistical or other evidence is not enough and it should be supported by some plausible, theoretical or logical explanation.

Positivist vs. interpretive • Positivist approach • A framework of research in which the researcher sees people as phenomena to be studied from the outside, with behavior to be explained on the basis of facts and observations gathered by the researcher.  highly suspicious attempts • Interpretive approach • Place more reliance on the people being studied to provide their own explanations of their situation or behavior.  getting inside the minds of subjects and seeing the world from their point of view and involving qualitative methods and generally an inductive approach

Experimental vs. non-experimental • Experimental approach • Control the environment of subject of research and measuring the effects of controlled change. • More popular in the natural sciences than in the social sciences • Closet to psychology and the human movement aspects of sports research • e.g. setting up experiments in which people are subject to ‘stimuli’ and study their reaction.

Experimental vs. non-experimental • Non-experimental approach • More natural in the social sciences in which it is difficult to control the environment of subject of research • Less clear-cut result than in the case of controlled experiment due to identifying the effects of the change of interest • e.g. in studying the effects of income on leisure participation patterns or touristic behavior, gather information on the leisure and travel behavior patterns of range of people with different levels of income.

Primary vs. secondary data • It is advisable to consider whether it is necessary to go to the expense of collecting new information. • Primary data : new data to be collected in the proposed research • Secondary data : existing data, such as official government statistics or financial records from a leisure or tourism facility or service

Self-reported vs. observed data • Self-reported data : asking people about their behavior, attitude and aspirations using interviews or respondent-completed questionnaires. • Problems : nonresponse, liar, recall… • e.g. the amount of alcohol they drink, the amount of exercise they take, how much money they spent on a recreational or holiday trip some months ago or even yesterday…

Self-reported vs. observed data • Observed data : finding out how children use a playground or how adults make use of a resort area or a park, just watch what they do.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative • Qualitative research • a great deal of information about a small number of people rather than a limited amount of information about a large number of people • Not presentable in numerical form • Include observation, informal and in-depth interviewing and participant observation. • Initially developed by anthropologist and adapted by sociologists

Qualitative vs. Quantitative • Quantitative research • Presentable in numerical form • Involve statistical analysis statistical inference • Two types of methods for quantitative approach • Type A : making use of statistical methods and tests, American Journal of Leisure Research • Type B : using percentages, descriptive statistics, British Journal Leisure Studies

Validity vs. Reliability • Validity is the extent to which the information collected by the researcher truly reflects the phenomenon being studied. • Since empirical research is based on people’s own reports in the responses to questionnaire-based interviews, the data are subjects to a number of imperfections. • More detailed questioning is needed to remove ambiguity complexity of question

Validity vs. Reliability • Reliability is the extent to which research findings would be the same if the research were to be repeated at a later or with a different sample of subjects. • More reliable in the natural sciences where experimental conditions are properly controlled but less reliable in the social sciences where human beings in differing and ever-changing social situations are dealt • Be cautious when making general, theoretical, statements on the basis of experimental research

Approaches to leisure and tourism research