ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the platform considerations of being, meaning and identity – that is, the ontological assumptions which inevitably precede the conduct of each and every research study. In focusing upon those sorts of ontological questions of perceived reality and human experience that underpin qualitative inquiry, the chapter declares that the investigator’s understanding about ontology is fundamentally a matter of sociological or anthropological awareness. This awareness constitutes the degree to which
the researcher has competency in envisioning ‘the real cultural world’ of the local groups and other involved populations which are concerned in the given study locale. This circumspection and rigour is particularly required in tourism studies because researchers engaged in the field customarily have to consider the impacts or the influences of tourism upon a wide variety of different regional, ethnic, religious, subcultural and other ‘special-interest’ sanctioning groups. It is also deemed to be essential because tourism is customarily a quite magnetic force these days in the very demaking and very remaking of held individual and societal ‘realities’. The chapter therefore argues that all who probe tourism settings must seriously be tuned into such matters of reflective ontological concern.
