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
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Cross-disciplinary dimensions
The disciplinary traditions of leisure and
tourism research
 Leisure and tourism studies is a multi-disciplinary,
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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
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Five main elements: people, organizations,
services/facilities/attractions, the linkages
between these three elements, the physical
environments within which everything takes
place
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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.
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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 preindustrial 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 decisionmaking 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
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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
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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
Non-empirical approach
 Involve the collection
 Theoretical research
and/or analysis of data
with no reference to
information about the
 Informed by
‘real world’ is likely to
observations or
be of limited value
information from the
‘real world’ but usually
 Non-empirical
informed by some sort
contributions are needed
of theory or conceptual
to review and refine
framework
ideas and to place the
empirical work in
 Provide some of
context
‘building blocks’ of
It is rare
for anyand
research
to be purely empirical or purely theoretical.
research
knowledge
Typically theoretical and empirical research coexist and enhance each other.
Induction vs. deduction
B. Analysis
A. Observation/
Description
C. Explanation/
Hypothesis/Theory
Induction vs. deduction

Inductive

Deductive
 Begin at point A
 Begin at point C, with a
 Proceed to point B
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
 Arrive at point C
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The explanation is
induced from the data.
The data come first and
the explanation later.
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
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
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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
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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
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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
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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