Cultural Tourism Research Methods

Cultural tourism includes experiencing local culture, traditions and lifestyle, participation in arts-related activities, and visits to museums, monuments and heritage sites. This book reviews a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods applied to the field. It is suitable for students and researchers in tourism and leisure.

As research in tourism and hospitality reaches maturity, a growing number of methodological approaches are being utilized and, in addition, this knowledge is dispersed across a wide range of journals. Consequently there is a broad and multidisciplinary community of tourism and hospitality researchers whom, at present, need to look widely for support on methods. In this volume, researchers fulfil a pressing need by clearly presenting methodological issues within tourism and hospitality research alongside particular methods and share their experiences of what works, what does not work and where challenges and innovations lie.

Stressing the interconnectedness of tourism and culture, this valuable handbook explores what tourism industry professionals need to know to succeed. Globalization, landmark attractions, and cultural heritage are among the topics discussed from both international and local perspectives. Each chapter also concludes with a comprehensive series of self-assessment questions and a proposed task that professionals and students can do to enrich their cultural learning experience.

Within the tourism industry there is a growing consensus on the need for research to investigate the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism. However, existing research methods texts are based solely on either the business approach or the social science approach to tourism. They often fail to provide real world examples of how to plan, implement or analyse tourism related research. This book aims to address this divide by integrating theory with practice through the inclusion of specific tourism research case studies alongside research theory. It considers a wide range of research issues, approaches and techniques with contributions from both experienced and new researchers.

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.

This timely Research Agenda moves beyond classic approaches that consider the relationship between heritage and tourism either as problematic or as a factor for local development, and instead adopts an understanding of heritage and tourism as two reciprocally supported social phenomena that are co-produced.

'This is an excellent book which significantly contributes to tourism research and education. It takes a rigorous yet readable style to address twenty five of the most pertinent quantitative and qualitative techniques applied in tourism research. the book will appeal to a wider readership of social scientists as well as to scholars of tourism as each chapter provides a thorough overview and explanation of the techniques irrespective of their tourism application.' – Dimitrios Buhalis, Bournemouth University, UK This insightful book explores the most important established and emerging qualitative and quantitative research methods in tourism. the authors provide a detailed overview of the nature of the research method, its use in tourism, the advantages and limitations, and future directions for research. Each chapter is structured to provide information on: the nature of the technique and its evolution; background and types of problems that the technique is designed to handle; applications of the technique to tourism, including discussion of studies that have used the technique and their findings; advantages and limitations of the technique conceptually and for policy formulation; and further developments and applications of the technique in tourism research. Handbook of Research Methods in Tourism will appeal to social scientists, students as well as researchers in tourism who use quantitative and qualitative research techniques.

This insightful book reappraises how traditional high culture attractions have been supplemented by popular culture events, contemporary creativity and everyday life through inventive styles of tourism. Greg Richards draws on over three decades of research to provide a new approach to the topic, combining practice and interaction ritual theories and developing a model of cultural tourism as a social practice.