Research Methods in Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management

5.3 Research design and the literature review

The literature review provides the framework for the design of the research method.

It is very useful to try to link the review to the questions that are to be asked in your

survey or interview. You can see one example of this below where the student

wanted to carry out research with small entrepreneurial hotel and restaurant

companies in Germany to see whether they thought that the Slow Food movement

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and label could offer them any competitive advantage. The student framed the

questions around the literature and produced a chart to summarise the issue that he

was interested in finding out about, and the relevant authors. This allowed him to

return to the literature review later on during the analysis stage and to test whether

his research matched the views of the authors in the literature review or not. This can

be referred to as ‘threading the literature’ through the whole research process.

Illustration 5.1 Linking the literature to the questions

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Note: The example citations in the final column are not included in

the References, as these are for illustration purposes only

Source: ‘The potential of using Slow Food for gaining strategic

marketing advantage in small hospitality organizations’ by Julius

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Anders, supervised by Susan Horner, César Ritz Colleges,

Switzerland.

When Julian produced his first version of the chart (

Illustration 5.1

), I encouraged

him to widen his literature review further so that other authors could be incorporated

in each box, and so that he could consider research that had been carried out in

relation to sustainability in hospitality as well as by general management

commentators. This allowed him to get a deeper and fuller picture. In this way, the

linking of the literature to the methodology was developed and refined until he was

happy with the final version of the questions. He could also check whether he had

the correct authors in the literature review.

Consider another example of a chart that was used to develop the questions for an

online survey that was carried out by Luke to try to discover the perceptions of local

food in the Devon area (

Illustration 5.2

). A quantitative approach was used to both

collect and analyse data from 175 respondents who were asked 16 questions; 100

responses were collected through random sampling across different locations in

South Devon and 75 responses were obtained online through the Qualtrics package

(2013). We consider the Qualtrics package later in the chapter. A series of filter

questions were included within the survey to ensure analysis was only completed on

respondents fitting each hypothesis, and all questions were closed.

Illustration 5.2 Linking the literature to the questions in the survey

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Note: The example citations in the final column are not included in

the References, as these are for illustration purposes only

Source: ‘Consumer attitudes to local food produce in boutique

hotels’ by Luke Slater, supervised by Christina Kelly, Plymouth

University.