Journal of Travel Research Facilitating Content Analysis in Tourism Research On behalf of: Travel and Tourism Research Association can be found at: Journal of Travel Research Additional services and information for Citations: Facilitating Content Analysis

The article proposes a new methodological approach to facilitate content analysis of electronic textual data in a more efficient and transparent way. The textual data are processed iteratively by two software products, CATPAC and WORDER. This approach permits smoothing of the original textual data, identification of the variables of interest, frequency count of the occurrences of these variables in the texts being processed, storage of frequency results in general purpose statistical packages, and subsequent dimensional reduction of word-frequency data by means of factor analysis. Application of this methodology is illustrated on three examples of destination-image studies, which cover content analyses of open-ended responses to e-survey questions, texts from tourism Web sites, and newspaper articles. Advantages and disadvantages of the proposed research technique, its contribution to tourism studies, and the place of the approach within the quantitative paradigm of content analysis are also discussed. Keywords The methodology of content analysis has been developing since the early 1920s in such areas of scientific inquiry as political science, psychology, and communications; it was also adopted in tourism research, though to a lesser extent. In the authors' view, content analysis used in tourism studies is, generally, less sophisticated than in other disciplines; it is especially true for research that falls within the quantitative paradigm of content analysis. Quantitative methods are considered more conducive to making statistical inferences, comparisons, and hypothesis testing; however, the analyses are repeatedly limited to simple word-frequency counts. This article proposes a methodological approach to analyzing multiple files of textual data typical in tourism studies in a transparent, replicable, and effective way. The approach proceeds with data preparation, identification of key variables, obtaining the word-frequency matrix, and subsequent dimensional reduction of word-frequency data. Obtaining a matrix of word frequencies from multiple units of qualitative data allows more sophisticated statistical analyses of data and, ultimately, hypothesis testing. The approach uses an efficient combination of two computer programs, CATPAC and WORDER; however, the methodology is not dependent on this particular software tandem. Other programs that perform the same functions can be used, and the choice, as always, is with the researcher. The objective of the article is to show that the proposed methodology is firmly grounded in the theory and practices of content analysis and is both simple and efficient enough to facilitate statistical data analysis in tourism studies. The article is organized as follows. The Literature Review section discusses two general classes of content analysis, quantitative and qualitative, with an emphasis on the former as more relevant to the proposed approach. It also provides a brief overview of computer-aided text analysis (CATA) software and discusses its general limitations and usage in tourism-related studies. The approach itself is described in the Method section. It combines the two CATA programs, CATPAC and WORDER, to effectively deal with data preparation, identification of image variables and processing of a large number of textual files of similar types, and use dimensional reduction of word-frequency data, for example, by means of factor analysis. Three examples of approach implementation in destination-image studies are given in the Application Examples section; each example focuses on certain aspects of the approach. The Theoretical Considerations section discusses the approach in the context of content-analysis methodology, particularly taxonomy proposed b