ABSTRACT
The beginning of this journey was heavily influenced by the positivist traditions influencing tourism research and, in particular, the highly quantitative, etic research being conducted into tourism motivation. The development of a multi-method approach, however, was based upon the recognition that quantitative methods alone would not allow the research to ‘fully address questions of understanding and meaning’ (Riley and Love 2000: 166). It was believed that a qualitative method would allow the conceptual foundations of the ITR scale to be explored and to move us further towards more emic categories of knowledge concerning how participants define and value concepts related to novelty-seeking, and that this would provide themes which were meaningful in a marketing context.
