Content area
Full text
Methodological evolution in tourism and hospitality research
Every research project is framed within an essential set of beliefs and values about reality, truth and knowledge, whether the researcher is aware of it (Jubien, 1997). Scholars guided by their ontology, epistemology, axiology and ethics (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011; Lincoln and Guba, 2003) choose the most appropriate theoretical framework to answer the research questions. Tourism scholars distinguish between mono-method, when only one qualitative or quantitative method is used in a study, a mix-method (integration of quantitative and qualitative methods in one study) and a multi-method, when study uses several qualitative or quantitative methods (but not both) (Molina-Azorín and Font, 2016). Recently multi-method established itself as central in many branches of social science, and it represents an indispensable method to scholars conducting large-scale research projects (Goertz, 2017; Seawright, 2016). In tourism and hospitality management scholars used multi-method approach to gain richer saturation of data and ensure the “validity” (Lo and Lee, 2011), gain deeper understanding and provide participant’s subjective voices (Poria, 2006) and proposed netnography as a multimethod to investigate the power of customers' contributions in social networks for new services development (Sigala, 2012).
Furthermore, within the past 20 years tourism and hospitality scholarship experienced “critical turn” in tourism and hospitality studies which shifted researchers attention toward the use of new, creative, dynamic and multifaceted methods to address wider array of issues (Ateljevic et al., 2012; Lugosi et al., 2009; Altinay and Taheri, 2018; Ryan, 2018). As such, this paper is focusing on new, qualitative and creative method -LEGO® Serious Play®. This paper discusses method’s origins, its benefits and challenges and is using examples of empirical material from a qualitative multi-method study aiming to understand host-guest experiences in World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) programme which connects farmers and volunteers interested in organic farming, social interactions and mutual learning (McIntosh and Campbell, 2001; Wengel et al., 2018; Deville et al., 2016).
While LEGO® Serious Play® has been used as a legitimate research technique in business, education and counselling (Boyne, 2014; Grienitz et al., 2013; James, 2013a; Peabody, 2015), within mainstream tourism and hospitality research this method is rarely used (Wengel et al., 2016; Tuominen and Ascenção, 2016;...