Research Methods in Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management

Objectives of your visitor survey

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To establish:

1. The characteristics of current visitors: who they are, where they come from and

any other variables you consider suitable for comparative purposes.

2. Their past and current day-trip activities.

3. Their use of Tiptree Zoo and their opinions on current aspects of it.

What you have to do

1. Criticise the existing questionnaire and state all that you consider to be wrong

with it, both in terms of what is presented and the approach that was adopted.

To this end, you may have to make deductions about aspects that are not

immediately apparent.

2. Write a report indicating how you would satisfy the brief given. The report

should include an identification of the necessary planning stages, and reference

to the investigatory, analysis and write-up stages.

In short, you need to design a suitable approach and include aspects such as methods,

sampling, population and sample identification, fieldwork, analysis requirements and

proposed budget. On this latter point, no budget has been set and your boss has

indicated that she would like you to prepare and justify what you need to do the job

properly. If what you propose is not feasible within the context of the objectives, you

can expect the supervision of the contract to be passed to your main competitor in the

department and you will end up being an interviewer and doing the coding!

The following is the questionnaire designed by your boss for criticism. The method

for this visitor survey was an on-site face-to-face method of data collection. No other

techniques were used.