Management perception of service quality in the hospitality industry

3
 
Research Methodology 
This chapter is meant to introduce the reader to the research strategy and the reason of 
choice as well as the methods of gathering data. 
3.1
 
Qualitative Research Strategy 
A qualitative approach will be used for this research as the main purpose of this 
research is to understand the perspective of service managers in the hospitality industry 
towards service quality and the objective of this research is to find out how service 
managers believe service quality to be and the reasons for this.
Qualitative research addresses human activity, and aims to describe, understand and 
interpret this activity. It seeks answers to questions of what, why and how. With the 
use of a qualitative approach this purpose could be reached. This can be justified 
through the characteristics of qualitative research methodologies. 
Although there are two types of qualitative methodological research approaches, 
namely a positivism methodology and a interpretivism methodology , the difference 
between the two is that positivism focusses on theory testing and measuring as well as 
using prior theory to generate a hypothesis which a relatively structured design to 
reach validity for theory testing whereas interpretivism seeks to build theory as a result 
of data insight, where prior theory may be used but depends highly on its necessity to 
guide the researcher to seek an actual reality in a specific situation. (Carson, Gilmore, 
Perry & Gronhaug 2001, 65)
As can be seen in figure 5, the difference between the two methodological approaches 
in qualitative research are different but have the same goal when chosen to follow the 
an in-depth interview or case studies, which is why the type this research strategy 
follows the in-depth interview method of gathering data which leans more on the 
interpretive side of qualitative research.

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40 
According to Carson et. Al, ( 2001, 65) the essence of in-depth understanding is to 
focus on managerial problems in order to unfold the process which lies between to 
understand why these problems occur in the first place. 
Figure 10. Methodologies in the context of research philosophies