Key concepts in tourism research / David Botterill & Vincent Platenkamp.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contending that tourism research is mainly social research and that the social sciences should be the research foundation, Botterill, a freelance academic and higher education consultant associated with tourism centers and departments at the U. of Westminster and U. of Wales Institute Cardiff, UK, and NHTV U. of Applied Sciences Breda, and Platenkamp (Centre for Cross-Cultural Understanding, NHTV U. of Applied Science Breda, the Netherlands) select concepts based on Anglo-American and European social science traditions to show graduate students how these concepts have been applied in tourism research. They provide definitions and a guide to the relevance of a concept to a research project; applications to various topics, with examples drawn from tourism research journals; and the main ideas and techniques associated with the concept, as well as its historical development, philosophical pretext, and principal claims, and a short critique of it. Arranged in alphabetical order, concepts include ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, interview/focus groups, narrative, phenomenology, repertory grid, survey, symbolic interactionism, case study, content and document analysis, action research, the Delphi Method, evaluation research, grounded theory, visual methods, feminism, and postmodernism.