Book Reviews Copyright ©2011 Tourism Recreation Research Quantitative Methods in Tourism: A Handbook

Many social scientists classify research methods as qualitative or quantitative. This intuitively appealing distinction, however, is misguided. The phrase, ‘qualitative research’, is used to refer to observational techniques, interpretive methods, epistemologies, or even ontologies, sometimes based on a political agenda. While not as imprecise in its connotations, ‘quantitative research ’ still covers a plethora of types of data and methods. Quantitative data may refer to intrinsically numerical data such as distances travelled or trips expenditures. It also refers to the use of numbers as categorical labels, such as assigning a value of ‘1 ’ to females and a value of ‘0 ’ to males. And it refers to the use of numbers to code inherently qualitative information such as tourist attitudes or service quality. A more useful distinct is between subjective research, whic