2017 ttra Annual International Conference

We are thrilled to announce the third ttra Qualitative Research Methods workshop! This workshop continues to provide ttra attendees with the opportunity to learn more about the joys and challenges of qualitative research. This year’s program will provide opportunities for attendees to learn from each other through roundtable presentations and from Dr. Heather Mair who will lead a workshop on the use of memory-work. The roundtable presentations focus on discussion and engagement with a small audience and do not utilize powerpoints, but rather other presentation aids are encouraged (e.g. audio files, short videos, or photographs). 

 

SCHEDULE:

 

1:00 PM - 2:20 PM - Workshop with Dr. Heather Mair

Dr. Mair will lead an 80-minute workshop designed to bring together tourism scholars to consider the potential of memory-work for tourism research and teaching. The goal of this workshop is to have participants get a sense of the memory-work approach. The workshop begins with a very brief introduction of the main tenets of the methodology as well as some discussion of its use in tourism studies and elsewhere. Next, in order to illustrate how the methodology works, participants will be asked to reflect on their personal travel experiences and to write a short memory to be shared with the group. After reading the memories, a short, collective analysis will be facilitated and the process will be discussed in relation to memory-work’s potential to tourism studies. As the workshop will illustrate, however briefly, memory-work is rather demanding. It requires a considerable amount of time and commitment by all involved. Nonetheless, the workshop will offer participants a sense of how the methodology works and will have an opportunity to ‘practice’ memory-work on their own and with the group.

 

2:20 PM - 2:30 PM - Break

 

2:30 PM - 2:55 PM - Roundtable Presentations: Research Findings 1

 

Table 1: "Scenario Planning: A Planning Tool for an Uncertain Future."

Gyan Nyaupane, Arizona State University; Christine Buzinde, Arizona State University

Table 2: "The Emergence of Craft Distilling Tourism: The Role of Community Capitals."

Whitney Knollenberg, North Carolina State University; Carla Barbieri, North Carolina State University

Table 3: "Discerning Differences in Cross-border Shopping Occasions."

Michael Mulvey, University of Ottawa; Michael Lever, University of Guelph

Table 4: "A Grounded Theory Analysis of Local Residents’ Perceptions of Social Meanings of Recreational Beaches."

Mingjie Gao, University of Waterloo

2:55 PM - 3:00 PM - Break

 

3:00 PM - 3:25 PM - Roundtable Presentations: Methods

 

Table 1:  "Reflections on Using Video as a Data Collection Tool in Narrative Inquiry."

Tom Griffin, Ryerson University

Table 2: "Qualitative Research Methods for Critical Inquiry: An Emergent Method of Analysis from the Social Sciences."

Linda Lowry, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Elizabeth Cartier, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Table 3: "A Changing Netnographic Landscape:  Is There a Place for Online Ethnography in Hospitality and Tourism?"

Elizabeth Whalen, University of Houston

Table 4: "Photo Elicitation in Tourism Research: Investigating the Travel Experiences of Study Abroad Participants."

Ara Pachmayer, Humboldt State University; Kathleen Andereck, Arizona State University

3:25 PM - 3:30 PM - Break

 

3:30 PM - 4:00 PM - Panel Discussion 

 

Moderators: Nancy McGehee, Virginia Tech; Nicole Vaugeois, Vancouver Island University; Marlise Taylor, VisitNC

Note: this session will be offered in 2 parts - Part I will cover text analysis and Part II will cover network analysis with social media data.

The workshops will explain to participants how to study online communities and social networks and apply some of the new tools and methods for analyzing and visualizing social media data developed by the Social Media Lab. Participants will learn how social media is changing the ways in which people communicate and disseminate information and how these changes impact the social, economic and political structures of modern society. The broad aim is to provide researchers with the skills needed to help decision makers with additional knowledge into the behaviors and relationships of online network members by extracting actionable insights from large social media datasets. One such tool is Netlytic, a cloud-based text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarize large volumes of text and discover social networks from conversations on social media sites such as Twitter, Youtube, blogs, online forums and chats. Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops to follow the workshop instructions.

As researchers, we love stats, data, and facts.  They are the bread and butter of what we do best and are the cornerstone of evidence-based decision making.  But too often, we get caught up in providing the data, the charts, the graphs, the sources, the important details on the data, the caveats, and the methodologies that our audience becomes overloaded and tunes out. This can happen as often with CEOs as with researcher colleagues.

There is so much information available, that one of the core skills of the modern researcher is to communicate your analysis and findings in a way that engages your audience, helps them understand why your research is important, and guides them to make decisions – whether that is a government policy, a marketing strategy, an investment decision, or even to continue reading your research.

Storytelling offers clues on how to keep your audience engaged and tuned-in.  This workshop will review techniques to use stories as structure and hero in your presentations; stories that will be remembered and inspire action.

The practice of leisure tourism as one of the most pervasive and persistent markers of modernity owes a great deal to the concept of heritage. Indeed, the histories of heritage and of tourism overlap considerably and have long fed off one another. Heritage too is a powerful and essentially modern construct. If we accept that to varying degrees, tourism is an act of escape, then heritage not only provides a gateway for escape but also an important destination. This presentation will examine the construct of heritage as the ‘ultimate’ tourist attraction and argue that societies have long constructed heritage sites that are deliberately designed to attract the tourist. This challenges the idea that there is something intrinsic in heritage but rather, through carefully constructed narratives, aesthetic manipulation, and symbolic and political positioning, it is capable of being transformed into the most desirable of tourist experiences. Over a long period, the tourism sector has been adept and proactive in such transformatory practices, often in spite a more reactionary attitude from heritage producers and managers. Of course, each sector can learn from one another but neither can defy the demand from ‘tourists’ seeking to engage with the past.  To ‘visit’ the past works with imaginaries and opens up vast possibilities that meet social needs for identity, belonging, and meaning.