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Hospitality researchers make extensive use of surveys to collect empirical data. Using surveys for data collection has inherent dangers. These dangers are well understood and have been discussed across a wide range of disciplines. The present article reflects on survey research in hospitality with the purpose of increasing the validity of conclusions drawn from survey studies. First, the article summarises the dangers related to survey research. Next, a small set of recently published articles in the field of hospitality is inspected to assess whether there is a reason for concern about the validity of survey research in hospitality. Finally, the article discusses measures that can be taken by survey researchers, reviewers and editors to mitigate the risk of reducing the validity of findings as a consequence of collecting empirical data using surveys.
Known dangers of survey research
Lack of item content validity
Validity is the extent to which a measure “measures what it purports to measure” (Carmines and Zeller, 1979, p. 4). If a measure fails to capture the essence of what it is intended to measure, valid conclusions cannot be drawn from the resulting data. Content validity can suffer for a number of different reasons, most commonly because the construct of interest cannot – by definition – be measured using a survey and because survey questions do not accurately capture the construct under study.
Behaviour falls in the first of these two categories. It cannot be measured validly using a survey. Researchers attempting to measure behaviour using surveys typically rely on stated behavioural intentions or reported past behaviour as a proxy for behaviour. This is despite the fact that many hospitality-related behaviours are accessible to measurement by observations, including hotel towel reuse (Baca-Motes et al., 2013; Dolnicar et al., 2017; Goldstein et al., 2008; Knezevic Cvelbar et al., 2017; Mair and Bergin-Seers, 2010), food waste behaviour (Juvan et al., 2018; Kallbekken and Sælen, 2013), ordering behaviour in restaurants (Kincaid and Corsun, 2003), dining expenditure (Reynolds et al., 2005), tipping behaviour (Jacob and Guéguen, 2012), electricity use in hotel rooms (Dolnicar et al., 2017) and guest movement around the destination (Shoval and Isaacson, 2007). Extracting insights from existing databases has also become more viable than ever: researchers can...