Using conceptual framework in qualitative research (2)

Now let’s look at findings. The first part is about the demographic profile of our informants. If we have a look of the table two, it shows us the profile of the respondents. Regarding the age, we have our respondents aging from 18 to 60 or above. Regarding the age, many of our respondents are in the age of 30 to 59. In terms of the gender, we have more female than male. Let’s look at the education. Eighteen out of forty five of our respondents are holding the university degree or above. About their occupations, many of them are retired from jobs, and also thirteen of them are professionals. Here’s their income level.

And also regarding their marital status, twenty eight of them are married, and sixteen of them are single.

This figure shows the major findings of this study. If we have a look of the time sequence, we got six dimensions in order. We have the purposes, determinants, activities, intensity, impacts, also the attitude. And in those areas, each of those parts, we have the direct coding. So all those information are directly coded from our textual data. However, how do we generalize the typology? It needs our researchers’ own judgements on this. We need to understand all those kind of information, and put them in our mind. When we relate back to those literature, we have those knowledge in mind already. We try to conceptualize those different types and try to figure them out, put them into different categories.

And that’s how we form this kind of five categories of the tourist. It’s not really simply directorial coding, it requires more from that. All right. So if we had a detailed look of each of the stages, for example, in the before contact stage, we have two dimensions, purposes and determinants. From the dependents, they travel with the limited contact with the local people, which means their purpose of contacts is not really applicable. And all the way down from here, some people think the travel they contact with the people to ask for help information, or to solve problems, or to explore destination to some extent.

Or to the last one, belonging seekers try to get the most of the trip, and try to interact as much as possible with the local people. So in that case, their purpose is to contact, is to ask for information, explore destination, but also to have the social network and sharing with each other. Regarding the determinants of travel, dependents think characters, language, perceptions, also the culture distance, they all influence their social contact with the local host. And then we have conservatives, they report a lot of attributes within the determinants, for example, characters, language, also length of stay, cultural distance, mode of travel, which means are they individual travelers or they are group travelers.

And also travel companions, criticizers, as they also report some of the determinants, the same as the explorers. And the last type, they report the length of stay, characters of the locals, also places of the stay, which means actually they have less determinant to report. And many of them are external factors, not from their internal, right? In the next part, the during contact stage, dependents tend to have a limited activities with the local host. And then the conservatives, they report service-oriented contact with the host. Criticizer, explorers, they also have the service-oriented contact with the host, and they tend to have some communications with them.

And let’s look at other, the last one, the belonging seekers, they tend to have a lot of huge variety of activities with the host. It includes the service-oriented and also the social-oriented contact. Also they tried to attend different events from local communities, also even visit local homes.

The next one, intensity, the dependents tend to have a superficial contact with the host. Since they don’t really contact much with them, until all the way down here to the belonging seekers, they tend to have a very profound contact with the local people. And the last one, that’s the after contact stage. For that, we investigate the impacts of those contacts on tourists. Since those dependents, they have limited contact with the local people, their impacts are limited. And then conservatives, they have some recommendations through some superficial contact with the local people.

And criticizers, explorers these type have more impacts, for example, know more of about the destination and recognize their differences, and changing their image about destination, and also enhance their cross-culture competence. At last, the belonging seekers tend to make friends with local people, also change their ethnic identities to some extend. The last part of this after contact stage is their attitude. So since the dependents, they can’t have a little interaction with the local people. So their attitudes towards their contacts is not really positive or negative, is neutral. And then, since the belonging seekers had a lot of contact with local people, they tend to have a positive attitudes towards those contact with them.

And we have look at those travel experiences for different types of people. Those dependents, they tend to have a very limited international travel experience. Most of them travel very close to their original places, for example, in the Guangdong Province of the South China. And for those belonging seekers, they are very experienced individual travelers. Discussions and implications. The generated topology shows a great consistency with the other tourist taxonomies. And this typology take the sequence into consideration, which are before contact, during contact and after contact. Such a sequence reveals the casual relationship among the six dimensions and also provide a possibility for the future quantitative research.

In this study, we also find that among those contact, they have social-oriented and also the service-oriented social contact. And different kind of contact can lead to different impact to the tourists. At last, our study provides implications for practitioners during the planning, marketing, and management stages of the tourist development.

To conclude this study, by conducting 45 in-depth interviews, this study explored purposes, determinants, activities, intensity, impacts and attitude of social contact between tourists and hosts. We employed qualitative research approach. A tourist typology was established according to their characteristics in those dimensions, suggestions for tourist planners, operators, and government officials are also provided. So that is the study. And hopefully you can have a better understanding of conducting different qualitative research.