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A review of hospitality research
A review of hospitality research
Hello everyone, my name’s Hailin Qu. I’m regents professor and William E. Davis Distinguished Chair, from Spears School of Business, School of Hospitality and Tourism Management . at the Oklahoma State University It’s very nice appreciation and honor to talk with you regarding some issues and development chance in Hospitality and Tourism Management research methods. This is not a complete instruction about the methods, but just to give you some ideas and introductions about the different methods used, particular some current new methods used in Hospitality and Tourism Management. First one, I would like to share with you a table， which is actually created by professor Pizzam.
Professor Pizzam was a former dean at the University of Central Florida, and he did a presentation about phases for the hospitality research. And he developed four phases, Story Teller, Profilers, Copy Cats, and Copy Cats & Innovators. I added phase five and changed a little bit about the content, and I tried to input something which I understand about the development of hospitality research. In professor Pizzam’s research, Story Teller actually is the first one, which is from 1930 to 1950, that is a very early stage. At that time the people involved in research, most of them are practitioners, which means the people working in the hotels, working in the restaurants, they write some stories about what are happening in their business.
So in that phase, the research type is mainly case study, the unit of analysis mostly is single unit, and no methods, no generalization, of course, there’s no theoretical contribution. For the second phase, we call the Profilers, which is from 1950 to 1970. There are some kinds of practitioners, and also involve some academic people, they did some empirical studies which are mainly simple surveys. And unit of analysis is single, some methods they used are univariate, of course there’s no generalization capability and no theoretic contribution. Number three, Copy Cats. We call Copy Cats mainly because we copy the methods from other disciplines, for example, from Business, from Management, Psychologies, Social Sciences.
And we try to use their methods that are steadily used into our field. So in that stage, from 1970 to 1990, the research participants involves academicians and practitioners, the research types of the empirical most are conceptual studies. They use both single and multiple analysis, also involve some Bi-Variate or Multi-Variate methods, there’s a limited or full generalization, and there are extensions of theoretical contribution in the study. We highlight these Copy Cats, because during that period of time, the most significant development actually is the doctor program in hospitality management. And most of you know, and Cornell is the first one established a program and PhD program, but they only produced a few doctoral students each year.
In the starting of middle eighties, some major universities started PhD program, such like Penn State, Purdue and Virginia Tech. So this is a significant improvement in terms of research in hospitality area, because the doctoral programs actually are the driven forces for the development of research. In nineteen eighty, there are programs coming up, but now we have more and more doctoral programs in this field, so that really pushes the advancement of research methods. The number four we call the Copy Cats & Innovators, and it’s from 1990 to 2010. In that time, most academic professors and graduate students all use different research projects, mostly empirical or maybe conceptual studies.
They used multiple analysis, and univariate or multivariate data analysis, and they have partial or full generalizabilities. And of course they have extension of existing theories, and some of them provided some original contribution in the study. Now phase five, which is current from 2020 up to now, and most people participated in actually are academic faculty members and western students. They did empirical, conceptual and experimental studies, the contribution is getting significant. And particularly for some journals right now, if you don’t have originality, which means you don’t have original contribution to the existing discipline, and your paper will not be accepted.
That phase five actually is a phase I add on, After that probably we have a more advancement regarding research in hospitality area. This is just a general brief review with all of you regarding the development of hospitality research. Currently, the empirical vs. conceptual, these two main streams are absolutely the majority of studies at the published or studies had been done. The empirical is about 84% and only about 16% is conceptual. And majority of the empirical articles published used the primary data, and only 18% used secondary data for the study, that’s basically the situation about empirical vs. conceptual. And these prominent research themes actually are published in Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research, and Tourism Management.
You can see clearly, the top one is the tourism business development, which is about 14%. But if you add the tourist behavior and consumer behavior, it’s about 40.4%. The majority studies done in the area are about behavior, that is the study that we come up a review for Annals, Journal of Travel Research and Tourism Management three journals. And regarding the methods used, also from these three journals, we divided them by conceptual, mixed methods, and quantitative and qualitative. And you will see, majority of conceptual study are about the model building, actually that’s the purpose for conceptual studies. And fifty percent is concept definition, but only about twenty-two percent about model building.
Regarding mixed methods, most of people use the survey, that is the majority, about twenty-eight percent, and eighteen percent use the method about interview. And quantitative, of course, the majority are also about survey studies. The majority of studies they did are using quantitative methods and inferential studies. And regarding qualitative, I think the majority is about interview or maybe content. There is just a brief overview about the methods used from these three journals. But unfortunately, these three journals are tourism journals, if we can review some more hospitality journals, for example, International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, or maybe Journal of Hospitality Tourism Research, so probably we can find out more information.
This is overview about methods used by the three journals.
This week focuses on the emerging issues in tourism and hospitality research. Under the guidance of Professor Qu Hailin and Marriana Sigala, who are new educators of our course, you will learn a variety of practical research methods and examples related to tourism research, including current research priorities, multi-level/multiple sources of data collection, mixed method and interdisciplinary research, and Delphi method in research design.
Marianna Sigala is a Professor in Tourism and Director of the Centre of Tourism & Leisure Management (CTLM) at the University of South Australia Business School. She is also an academic member of the CERM PI team of UniSA. She is a widely published authority in the area of Service Operations Management and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) applications in Tourism and Hospitality. She also has an interest in e-learning models and pedagogies, having published several research studies in these areas.
Now let’s get started with the first video of the fifth week. From this video, you will obtain more understanding on the present situation of hospitality and tourism research and five phases of its development.
From which phase did the research in hospitality and tourism begin to have some kind of theoretical contribution?
Please feel free to leave a comment in the discussion area.
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