Ontology, Epistemology: Paradigms and Parameters for Qualitative Approaches to Tourism Research

Les Killion and Rickie Fisher

He [God] may be back one day, but until then people will seek the reassurance of a wider human context, a bigger picture in which their own walk-on role gives life meaning and significance. Everybody wants to be in a good story. It's a natural impulse to shape the random events we live through into coherent narrative, otherwise our lives would feel like experimental theatre or abstract painting, which would be a complete bloody nightmare.

McCarthy, 2002: 48

This chapter provides some first steps in 'thinking about' qualitative research in general, and qualitative tourism research in particular. In writing this chapter, we made the deliberate decision to make it one of 'broad brush strokes', developing a general backdrop for the 'staging' of qualitative research. We have left it to others to add the specific details derived from their own approaches to qualitative investigations presented in the later chapters of this book. In this chapter, we aimed to provide a backdrop against which their specific investigations could be appreciated more insightfully. Structurally, the chapter revolves around a series of 'grand tour questions'. As in ethnographic investigations, so also in this chapter 'A grand tour question establishes a broad topic or scene ...' (Yin, 2010: 137). The grand tour questions addressed in this chapter include:

• What is qualitative research?

• What contributions can qualitative research make?

• In what ways does qualitative research differ from quantitative research?

• What relationships, interactions and tensions exist between qualitative research and quantitative research?

• What potential exists for mixed methods investigations?

• What are research paradigms and what paradigms provide the points of reference for qualitative investigators and their investigations?

• What are the key components comprising a paradigm? And, how are these different between qualitative and quantitative paradigms?

As mentioned earlier, this first encounter with terminology and underlying concepts should place you in an improved position from which you can proceed to think about the qualitative research undertaken by those investigators whose works are contained in the later chapters of this book. As you read of their endeavours, you should periodically return to the key concepts that are presented in this chapter and ask yourself questions: what was the nature and purpose of their investigations? Within the parameters of what paradigms did they locate their research? How did this choice relate to the purposes of their investigations? How did their choice of paradigm reflect in the research methods employed? And, how was the information generated from those methods analysed and presented? Before we consider these and other questions, and bearing in mind our earlier comments related to the broad-brush approach adopted in this chapter, let us turn our attention to the first of our grand tour questions: what is qualitative research?

The Nature of Qualitative Research

From any perspective, the adjective 'qualitative' indicates a focus on 'qualities' as opposed to the adjective 'quantitative' which implies a focus on measurements and numbers that indicate 'quantities'. In this sense, qualitative research has a very lengthy history insofar as humans have always been curious about others; have observed others and what they may be doing; and have asked others about their lives, their attitudes, responses, reactions and 'feelings' about things occurring within their world as they define it. In a very ordinary sense, throughout the course of our daily lives we are all qualitative investigators. Whether such observations and conversations represent qualitative research is, however, doubtful. It is the noun 'research' that makes the difference. 'Research' has come to imply that such observations and conversations are carried out with the intention of being systematic, purposeful, disciplined, informed and rigorous and are not simply the by-products of casual everyday social interactions between individuals. However, and somewhat ironically, it may be the very same interactions that may be of central interest to a qualitative researcher.

Nonetheless, and as Erickson (2011: 43) observes, ancient scholars such as Herodotus provided the 'precursors to qualitative social inquiry'. Erickson (2011: 43) also notes that throughout the works of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, writers and philosophers such as Isaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) contributed to the flourishing of 'descriptive reporting of everyday social practices'. However, much of this was to change as the Enlightenment unfurled its positivist flag over human enquiry throughout the 17th century.

The Enlightenment, heralded as it was by the works of thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton among others witnessed the emergence of the so-called 'scientific' approach to inquiry. In particular, this saw a growing emphasis placed on the measurement and enumeration of phenomena and the search for universal laws founded on causal relationships. In essence, quantitative approaches and measures began to provide the yardsticks that were used to determine whether an investigation met the rigorous standards and criteria of being 'scientific'. With universal laws being expounded within the physical and life sciences, some turned their attention to the possibility of formulating comparable universal laws applicable to the social world. Auguste Comte, whom some regard as the 'founding father' of the discipline of sociology, sought, for instance, to postulate a science of society that mirrored the earlier developments of causal laws in disciplines such as physics and chemistry which, even today, are still often referred to as...