Chapter 3 Research Methods
3.6 Research Merits, Challenges and Limitations
With all three aspects, where applicable, the potential associations of demographic factors with the students’ VFR travel behaviour, as well as their host–guest experiences were also investigated. These demographic factors were based on several questions in the online questionnaire that asked about the students’ demographic characteristics and background in New Zealand. During the analysis, the data collected from the online survey were analysed first. The qualitative data from the focus group discussions were then analysed in order to provide triangulation on the results from the quantitative data analyses, and to provide an opportunity to search for any new themes that help answer the research questions. The next section explains the research merits, challenges and limitations of this study.
discussions and, consequently, be more open in answering the questions and giving their opinions. Efforts were also made to create a comfortable environment for the focus groups. They were conducted in meeting rooms within the universities with refreshment provided.
In terms of contribution to current knowledge, findings of this study can add to the overall understanding of VFR tourism, particularly in the case of international PhD students. More specifically, the study may help one have a more comprehensive view on the VFR tourism behaviour of international PhD students, their experiences as VFR hosts and VFR guests, and the relationship between their VFR tourism experience and their sociocultural adaptation in the study destination. The study also contributes to understanding the impact of level and form of education on international students’ travel behaviour. It can serve as a foundation for further studies and research that examine the intersection between international education and VFR tourism. Further detail on theoretical and practical implications of this study is provided in Section 7.3.
3.6.2 Challenges and limitations
Collecting data for this study was a challenging process. For the online survey, it was difficult to approach the international PhD students across all universities in New Zealand for several reasons. This led to modifications in recruitment methods to obtain sufficient data. First, the original method of approaching the students via email (through university administrative personnel) was not permitted by some universities.
As an alternative, the researcher had to publish the research recruitment on public media such as postgraduate newsletters, Facebook pages and blogs. However, this alternative was not fully effective in terms of getting more respondents. The final approach was to use the email addresses of doctoral students published on the websites of several universities. There are several possible reasons why these methods did not result in an overall higher number of responses. Invitation emails might have gone to the students’ spam and did not get seen. Another possibility is that international PhD students may not have had high awareness of the mentioned channels (postgraduate newsletters, Facebook pages and blogs), or that they were simply not interested in such channels.
Among the advantages of online surveys mentioned earlier (Section 3.3.1), the
benefits of high response completeness and easy follow-ups are arguable. In this particular study, some responses were incomplete, and it was not easy to follow-up with those responses. This could be because the respondents filled out the survey within their own environment where noises and disruption might have occurred. Also, the responses were anonymous, so the researcher had no control over completeness or ways to follow up with those that were not fit for analysis. The overall responsiveness to this study also showed that the productivity of online survey methods is still limited. Therefore, more studies are needed to increase the effectiveness of this method given the rapid development of online technologies.
Another challenge was that the received responses showed inconsistent quality. The incompletion of some responses could be explained by several reasons including the language barrier (especially for respondents whose first language was not English), length of the survey, and other external disruptions they experienced while they were doing the survey.
In addition, questions on VFR travel frequency had overlapping categories for answer options (never, 1–3 times, 3–5 times, and more than 5 times). Although this problem was mitigated through the interpretation of the collected data during the data analysis process (i.e., to express the extent of frequency such as never, low, moderate, and high rather than pure numeric values), the overlapping might have confused the respondents. Because it was a self-completed survey, the researcher had little control over the process to make sure that all questions were understood correctly and answered. Moreover, as the students were approached using different methods, that might have had an impact on the consistency of the received responses. That is, each recruitment method might have targeted a different segment of the population than did others.
Regarding the use of focus groups, some limitations should also be acknowledged.
The first limitation was associated with the recruitment of participants for the focus groups. Because the students were invited to take part in the focus groups through the online survey, participation was totally voluntary. In addition, no incentives were provided to compensate for participants’ time, which could have impacted on responses from particularly busy or unavailable students (e.g., who were at a certain stage of the thesis process such as fieldwork). When enough interest (at least six responses) in each focus group was noted, arranging dates and times that suited most
people was also a challenge because everyone had a different schedule. Another problem encountered during the conduct of focus groups was that, in some cases, participants signed up for a focus group but did not turn up on the day. This resulted in a low number of participants in some conducted focus groups.
Second, the level of involvement in VFR tourism by participants within each focus group differed. Those who had only been in New Zealand for a short time and had not had many opportunities to travel to visit friends and relatives, were not able to contribute much to the discussion of some questions. This was compounded in some focus groups by low numbers of participants (the number of participants was as low as two). In such cases, the questions that could be asked depended heavily on what kind of VFR experiences the participants had had. For example, not many participants had engaged in VFR tourism in a third place (identified in the survey), and, thus, they could not contribute to some of the questions that aimed to explore this phenomenon in depth. In addition, being in the focus group discussion format might have meant that some participants did not express their opinion as much as others, and possibly they were not as objective as they would have been without others’ presence. These are some common disadvantages of the focus groups method mentioned in the literature (Acocella, 2012).
Another limitation is associated with the potential confusion around the term ‘local’
versus ‘non-local’. Although it was indicated in the questionnaire that ‘local’ means
‘New Zealander’. No definition of a New Zealander was provided, and this could have influenced the respondents’ answers. A New Zealander could, for example, be understood as: someone who was born and raised in New Zealand; someone who held a New Zealand citizenship or permanent residency; or someone who had simply lived in the country for an extensive period of time. Each of these groups may possess a distinctive set of behaviours and characteristics that is the result of their level of familiarity with, and understanding of, New Zealand. The way the respondents understood the term might have influenced their responses. This is, perhaps, one of the common challenges when doing research that involves terms with a lack of definitional clarity. Interpreting the results is, consequently, more challenging.
Despite the challenges and limitations noted in this section, the current study yielded useful results that answered the main research questions. These findings are presented