ABSTRACT
Considering that tourist sites are constituted by landscapes, built environments, shopping areas, exhibits, performances and many more visual, observable and behavioural phenomena, the use of the visual as data for analysis is clearly valuable for a number of different tourism research interests, projects, and desired outputs. Qualitative data analysis (QDA) of visual data can be employed to understand visitor responses to interactive exhibits in a historical museum, identify patterns of sociality and shared public space use at a beachside resort, or to assess the importance of authenticity expected by tourists at a heritage site. Such findings can be utilised for development, manage ment, improvement, and best practices in the tourism and leisure fields. As a means to demonstrate the value of QDA of visual data for tourism research, this chapter presents a basic overview of QDA methods for visual data through the presentation of a case study from the author's research on tourism and tourists’ experiences at commemorative historical sites. First, the entry points for research projects and the generation of research questions are discussed as a means to identify which of a wide variety of QDA methods is most appropriate for a given project. Second, a specific mode of QDA, discourse-centred thematic analysis, is demonstrated using data from the case study and the applied value of the analysis results is presented. A brief comparison of manual and computer-assisted data analysis methods concludes the chapter.
