Qualitative research refers to inquiries applying a range of qualitative methods in order to inductively explore, interpret, and understand a given field or object under study. Qualitative research in tourism takes its inspiration primarily from the cultural and social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. Most often, the aim of this research approach is to explore and search for meaning or to develop an understanding through empirical studies, generating rich descriptions or collecting material, which may become subject to interpretation. Qualitative research seeks to avoid making generalizations, grand claims, and reductions and is often characterized by a high level of reflectivity and sensitivity to power relations and ambiguity. All of these characteristics will be elaborated further below.

The concept of qualitative research covers a range of methodologies, but is usually contrasted with and seen in opposition to quantitative and deductive research, as it attempts to explore the complexity and fragmentary nature of the social world of tourism. This exploration can be carried out through ethnographic fieldwork and/or by applying various methods, which seek to deploy more inductive and explorative approaches. Such methods include interviews, participant or nonparticipant observations, focus groups, text and discourse analysis, photo and video documentation or elicitation, semiotic studies, autoethnography, and virtual ethnography (netnography). More recently, attempts have been made to explore relations between the performing arts and social science, e.g., through innovative methods such as poetry and virtual curating.

Ontology, epistemology, and methodology

As a multidisciplinary field, tourism research has incorporated a broad variety of discipline-based methodologies to study tourism as an economic and sociocultural phenomenon. The question of what methods to apply when conducting research has long been a contested issue within tourism research. This is explained by how the choice of methods is not only a question of “selecting the tools” to carry out research but is also intrinsically linked to ontological, epistemological, and political/philosophical issues of what to study, how to study it, and for what aims. This demonstrates how the phenomenon of tourism, the methods of its research, and the analytical engagement into its unfolding richness cannot be compartmentalized, but should be holistically grasped in conjunction.

Qualitative tourism research does not constitute one singular body of research. Nor is it in any way “epistemologically aligned.” Rather, it covers many theoretical and philosophical positions, such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, post-structuralism, and social constructivism. Many different research strategies are deployed, but a unifying trait is the wish to accommodate for nonquantifiable or noncumulative ways of enquiring into, understanding, and representing tourism. Hence, qualitative tourism research urges one to engage holistically as well as reflexively with tourism and with tourism research.

Qualitative tourism research not only refers to (qualitative) methods but also denotes a larger movement which challenges the previously dominating role of quantitative methods within the study of tourism. This movement is reflected in the emergence of new tourism research (Tribe 2005) and critical tourism studies (Ateljevic et al. 2007), which challenge functionalist and business-centered approaches to studying tourism. What characterizes these approaches are their attempts to raise attention to tourism as a cultural and socio-material phenomenon as opposed to merely an industry or an area of study confined to business, economics, and management. Instead of seeking immediate results or closure, it also attends to tourism realities (and research) as sensibilities, as ways to relate to and create the world, and as context-specific processes of living and knowing. Both methodologically and analytically, critical tourism research centers on themes such as power, identity, Othering, performativity, and embodiment, as well as gender, race, and other inequality-related issues.

The application of qualitative inquiry has meant a need to question and redefine criteria and research standards otherwise used in tourism research, as qualitative approach does not (seek to) conform to ideals such as truth, objectivity, and validity retrieved in the positivist sciences. In order to develop new ways by which to distinguish and evaluate good qualitative research, Jamal and Hollinshead (2001) suggested transparency, reflexivity, and dialog as essential when engaging in qualitative research. Hence, the development and strengthening of qualitative inquiry has challenged tourism research as a positivist or strictly business-directed science. It offers not only new methods and tools to engage with the field of study but also other standards by which to articulate and grasp it. This has also led to a new understanding of the performative capacities of methods and of how researching tourism is also a way of creating it in certain ways rather than others.

Qualitative research in tourism

Whether to apply quantitative or qualitative methods has been the subject of intense discussion and has often been accompanied with a dichotomous view of the field of tourism research as divided into a business-driven (quantitative) and socially oriented (qualitative) fraction. Its abstaining from reductionist representations and explanations has meant that until the late 1990s, qualitative research occupied a marginal position in tourism journal publications and doctoral thesis writings (Riley and Love 2000). Up until recently, the understanding of qualitative research as unable (or rather unwilling) to deliver the types of outcome, which “explain and predict” tourism, has impacted upon its ability to gain general acceptance.

Only slowly has tourism research made room for the changes in social and cultural sciences, which since the 1960s had opened up to new “alternative” paradigms and subsequent methodologies. By the turn of the millennium, qualitative research was increasingly gaining ground and has now become accepted as an essential and valid tourism research strategy to a broader audience of tourism scholars. This is exemplified by the collection of articles entitled Qualitative Research in Tourism: Ontologies, Epistemologies and Methodologies edited by Phillimore and Goodman (2004), the first book on qualitative tourism research methods to be published as a paperback. Also, it is reflected in the foundation of journals based on qualitative research such as Tourist Studies (2001) and a drastic rise in qualitative research-based publications in prominent journals such as Annals of Tourism Research and, to a lesser degree, Tourism Management.

Tourism as a heterogeneous field

Since the turn of the century, the research community is progressively coming to terms with the contributions of qualitative research in generating knowledge in and about tourism. In continuation to this, new issues and interests regarding the application and role of qualitative research can also be identified. One is a growing appreciation in business and management of the rich material and knowledge generated by qualitative research, for instance, through ethnography. As cultural insights are increasingly being perceived as “useful” in developing and managing tourism, “applied,” corporate, or business ethnography is on the rise. This trend raises new and critical questions on the changing impacts and power relations of qualitative research and knowledge production.

Another issue related to the status and practice of qualitative tourism research is the emerging critique of the dichotomous perception of tourism as either strictly instrumental or purely intrinsic. This understanding of research as divided into two incommensurable “camps” is gradually being replaced by a view of investigation as a highly complex network composed of heterogeneous and partially coherent practices. As an alternative to seeing the research in this field as bisected, one could also describe it, as done in Ren et al. (2010), as an intermingle of social and business research, teaching, funding, publishing, as well as other practical and “applied” activities, all of which engage with and construct tourism research as a field of practice.

The future for qualitative tourism research

As divided fractions in tourism research reconcile, the application of qualitative and quantitative methods may also become less contested, potentially leading the way to new ways of engaging with and creatively conjoining qualitative and quantitative methods and methodologies in the years to come. For instance, the huge amounts of big data currently being generated online represent a challenge – as well as an opportunity, for qualitative research. An example of this is to be found in Jóhannesson et al. (2014), in which digital methods are introduced as a way to mapping controversies. It is argued that the ongoing devising and use of numeric visualization tools to explore issues online affords new lines of inquiry which cut across the conventional quantitative/qualitative divide, spurring new questions about tourism and its relational ontologies.

A different, but undoubtedly related direction which qualitative tourism research is taking is linked to the ever more widespread attention to complexity, multiplicity, and intangible issues drawing, for instance, on insights from cultural and gender studies as well as science and technology studies. Already in 2001, in the first editorial of Tourist Studies, Franklin and Crang called upon new tools with which to study tourism not only as an industry and business but also as a mundane, embodied, enacted, and localized practice. Since then, a focus on mobility, affect, emotions, materiality, everyday life, and performativity has increased immensely and shown how cultural or social issues are not exogenous, but rather intrinsically linked to – or even cocreated in – tourism. Such movements have necessitated and spurred new methods of inquiring into the highly heterogeneous and relational, glocally situated, and fleeting practices of tourism.

In 2000, Riley and Love did not hold high hopes for the state and future development of qualitative research in tourism. Today, however, qualitative research is continuously expanding its toolbox thanks to mobile, autoethnographic, visual, digital, and sensory methods. Material semiotics and nonrepresentational approaches to the field urge the critical inspection not of how data is “extracted,” but rather how research material is composed and represented. The understanding of how research impacts and intervenes into a field of investigation raises the awareness of how research and knowledge creation is always a matter of doing ontological politics (Mol 1999), that is, of enacting particular versions of reality while Othering Others. Hence, qualitative tourism studies are not only of different realities but also of the ability to choose between them.

The field of tourism is witnessing an interest in the research community in tailoring qualitative methods (in combination with quantitative ones) to better engage with the complexity and multiplicity of tourism and of the social (Law & Urry 2004). Hence, the field of qualitative tourism research is currently witnessing a fruitful and dynamic stage of methodological innovation. The current refinement of qualitative research methods and the more systematic reflections on how their impacts shape and perform the industry and global society at large hold promise for the further development of tourism-based methods and their future integration into a larger body of social and cultural research.

See also

Epistemology, ethnography, methodology, multidisciplinarity, paradigm.