Dr. Bob McKercher:

I have noticed a disturbing trend in our research in recent times. The voice of the individual tourist is largely becoming irrelevant!

All too often, surveys are developed and then farmed out to firms that distribute the survey to their subscribers. Magically, within a few weeks, a spread sheet full of numbers is returned. These numbers are then uploaded onto SPSS or AMOS. A few clicks of a mouse later, and more numbers are produced.

Alternately, big data are bought and subjected to the same type of analysis. Again, a few clicks of the mouse and numbers or pretty images are produced.

Voila, the study is completed, without ever having to leave your office, talk to people, or actually interact with tourists and understand why they think the way they do.

In many ways, then, tourists are relegated to an amorphous set of homogeneous numbers. Even our word choice removes the person from the research process. We talk about B2C or C2C interactions and not about people interacting with businesses or other people.

The risk is that we have become expert at answering 'what' questions, but without involving tourists directly, we cannot answer 'why' and 'how' questions. Yet, in the bigger scheme of things, asking and answering 'why' and 'how' questions are where insights arise, new ideas emerge, innovation occurs and impact flows from our research that truly advances our field.

Don't get me wrong. There is nothing inherently wrong with using surveys, panel data and/or big data. But they only answer part of the question. Involving the tourist directly adds depth that cannot be gained by numbers alone.

Here are some suggestions:

Why not include a few open-ended, qualitative questions on surveys? Ask people to explain in a few words why they gave the answer they gave. Such questions take more time to analyse, but the results are well worth it.

Make sure to include a mixed method approach where possible by interviewing people to complement/supplement the survey data.

Get out of the office and talk to tourists, get to know industry, observe and question.

Tourism, ultimately is an experiential activity. It is hard to understand the subtleties involved in deciphering the meaning and value of experiences simply by using quantitative measures, just as it is almost impossible to measure the beauty of a piece of art through Likert scaled questions.

The tourist has to be directly involved in our research in order to really understand our field.

Let's make sure we put the tourist back into tourism studies.

🎓🗺 علم تهران 🌍📚

@Tehran_Science_IR