Using conceptual framework in qualitative research (1)

Hello, everyone. From last section, we know how to use the direct coding to conduct the qualitative research. And we continue with this one. So in this section, we would like to share how to use your conceptualization skill to conduct the qualitative research. And in this section we like to share with you one of our study published in Tourism Management,

and title is Tourist Typology in Social Contact: An Addition to Existing Theories. And in this paper, I would like to demonstrate how to use the conceptualization skill in your research. This is the outline I would like to follow. And as a highlight here, I would like to emphasize these two sections, conceptual framework and also the findings. So we start from the introduction. Tourists are surrounded by the social environment when entering a destination. Just imagine one of your trip. When you enter the destination, did you interact with the local residents? So what did you do? And what’s the experience of your travel?

So what did you do and how do you feel about your experience of interacting with the others? That’s also our interest in conducting this research. Well, after now we have initial literature research, we found that few studies emphasized tourists’ rich behavior patterns of social contact. And we feel we need more about multidimensional tourist typologies.

In that case, the objective of the current study is to explore dimensions of tourist -host social contact and to classify the tourists according to their characteristics across the dimensions.

Now we start literature review. At the beginning, we review those existing papers about social contact in general, and also the tourist-host contact particularly. On top that, we also used to do the dimensions comparison of those social context studies. And as displayed in this table, here shows all those existing studies using the multidimensional or dimensional studies of the social contact. As we can see here, starting from 1978, the Rothman and this study used one dimension activity to represent social contact. As this study was developed, we find more studies coming and they are using different kind of dimensions to represent the contact, for example, they have the number of contact points, frequency, quality, strength, influences and the others.

And after comparison, we feel that there’s no consistency among those studies about the dimensions in social contact. And that’s also why we want to conduct our own studies to see the dimensions of social compact in the tourism studies. This is the conceptual framework part. And we’re not really have this part in every single paper. But this one we feel is very important to use this one. It shows the developing process of now our existing framework. So let’s start from the beginning. We start from the Cohen’s theory of social contact, which was developed in 1972. And from his study, we can find out, he mentioned the extent and variety can determine the outcome of the social compact.

And then according to Cohen’ study, we try to fit those existing dimensions we showed in the table in the last slide and into his model. And this is what we got here. So we got a purpose, determinant, intensity, fitting in the extent of social contact. And we have impact and attitude fitting in the impact of social contact. And also we have the activity belongs to the variety of social contact. One step further, for now our current study, we consider time sequence into this model. So in that case, we have the before contact, during contact, also the after contact. So in that case, we fit in those dimensions again.

It’s like shuffled from that one, for example, before contact, we have the purpose and determinants of social contact. Right? And during the contact, we have those contact activity, and also the intensity of social contact. Last, we have the impact and attitude after we contact with those people. And that’s how our framework formed from the previous study, is about different stages with development occurred.

All right, so now let’s move to the methodology. In this study, we mainly focus on the interpretive paradigm, which means we believe that the reality is created by individuals in a society. If we can remember those paradigms differences, you can remember the interpretivism they believe that there’s no single truth. So that’s also why we decided to use the in-depth face to face interviews. And we try to collect the facts from different individuals.

In this study, we recruited Hong Kong permanent residents who had recently traveled to Mainland China as our sample. Here is the parts of the interview protocols. Firstly, we ask those the interviewees to recall their recent travel experiences to Mainland China. And then we ask them to memorize about their contact with the Mainland Chinese host during the visit. After that, we try to ask them to specify their perceptions of their purposes, impacts, determinants, intensity and attitude of social contact with the host. Last, we asked them to provide their demographic information to us. We stop inviting new respondents when reached information saturation. As a result, we had forty five interviews and each of the interview last from 26 to 88 minutes.

All those interviews were conducted in Cantonese, which is a mother language for our all informant. For those textual data, we try to use the of NVIVO to manage and analyze them. Like conducting the quantitative research, when we do qualitative research, we also need to ensure the trust worthless of the study. For example, we have those four dimensions to cover. We need to ensure the credibility, transferability, dependability and also the confirmability. For example, for the credibility, triangulation is a good tool to ensure that. And within the triangulation, we have the data triangulation, research triangulation. and also the theory triangulation.

As this is not the focus of this unit, if you have interest in this part, you are welcome to read our full paper.