Tourism Research Methods

Summer School 2023

Online July 10th-14th, 2023

The Summer School aims at offering a platform for PhD students, Post-docs and Researchers/Assistant Professors to engage with tourism research methods and tourism analytics as to enable them to acquire, perfect and refine their knowledge and expertise in designing and applying appropriate and novel research methods.


Visual Research Methods for Tourism

The first edition of the Tourism Research Methods Summer School will focus on Visual Research Methods for Tourism enabling participants to learn, improve and master visual qualitative and quantitative methods for research purposes. 

The Summer School also offers recommendations, strategies and tips on publishing when using novel, alternative or controversial research methods.


Scope of the 2023 Summer School

The 2023 edition of the Tourism Research Methods Summer School will focus on Visual Research Methods encompassing the following topic:

  • Visual Research Methods: from traditional to contemporary approaches
  • Instagramming tourism experiences: qualitative approaches
  • Innovative visual methodologies in event studies
  • Quantitative methods for visual data
  • Publishing visual research in tourism, leisure, and events


Speakers

Professor Maria Lexhagen,
Department of Economics, Geography, Law and Tourism, Mid Sweden University, Sweden


Short bio

Professor Maria Lexhagen obtained her Ph.D. from School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a full professor at Mid Sweden University, Sweden where she is associated with a leading tourism research center, Etour. Her research is focused on marketing and digitalization in tourism and cuts across both business, management, and consumer behavior. Most of her published work is in the area of perceptions of value, customer-based destination branding, destination management, business intelligence in tourism, and popular culture tourism with a focus on fan travel and destination development. Other recent research projects include topics such as sustainable food choice in destinations and climate friendly solutions for destinations. While her interest in scientific method cover a wide range of designs, two of her on-going projects have an experimental research design focus.

You can visit her page at  Maria Lexhagen


Lecturer Xavier Matteucci,
University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication, Vienna Austria


Short bio

Xavier Matteucci teaches in the areas of cultural tourism, marketing and research methodologies. His research interests include tourism experiences, creative tourism, slow travel, well-being and qualitative methodologies such as art-based visual methods and grounded theory. Xavier’s work with visual materials has been published in high impact international journals such as Tourism Management and Tourism Analysis. Xavier serves as editorial board member for various international tourism journals, and he has led European Commission funded consultancy research projects on sustainable cultural tourism.

You can visit his Google page at Xavier Matteucci


Dr Lyndon Nixon,
School of Applied Data Science, Modul Vienna, Austria


Short Bio

Dr Lyndon Nixon is an Assistant Professor at the School of Applied Data Science, Modul Vienna, Austria. His research interests cover the visual classification of photography to automatically extract the touristic destination image from social networks such as Instagram; the use of deep learning for predictive analytics in open domains such as predicting the next trending topic in online channels; the extraction and modelling of knowledge, e.g. about events, in graph structures and their combination with neural networks to improve computational understanding of the world. Dr. Nixon has 20 years of R&D experience, defining and developing new innovations in data and media annotation, linking and re-use. His experience includes scientific coordinator for the LinkedTV project and project coordinator of several EU and national projects for the Research Centre of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna.

You can visit his page at Lyndon Nixon


Dr Tijana Rakić Tourism,
School of Business and Law, Tourism, Hospitality and Events Research and Enterprise Group, University of Brighton, UK


Short bio 

Dr. Tijana Rakić is Principal Reader and leader of the Tourism, Hospitality and Events Research and Enterprise Group and the Masters programmes in Tourism and Events at the University of Brighton. She is an internationally established interdisciplinary scholar whose research projects, publications and interests predominantly lie within the themes of visual research methods; world heritage, tourism and national identity; tourism, leisure and art; narratives of travel and tourism; and representations of places, cultures and identities in promotional materials and popular media. Tijana is currently the Chair of the Geographies of Tourism and Leisure Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, as well as the co-editor of the Routledge book series titled Current Developments in the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism. She is a regular reviewer for several leading journals she serves on the editorial board of leading scientific journals in the field of tourism, geography and leisure.

You can visit her page at  Tijana Rakić


Associate Professor Serena Volo,
Faculty of Economics and Management, Research Cluster on Tourism, Marketing and Regional Development, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy


Short bio

Prof. Dr. Serena Volo is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Faculty of Economics and Management of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. She is member of the Research Cluster  on Tourism, Marketing and Regional Development and Vice-director of the Competence Centre in Tourism Management and Tourism Economics, TOMTE. She has chaired several editions of CBTS, the Consumer Behavior in Tourism Symposium. Her research interests include consumer behavior in tourism, experience and emotions in tourism, visual research methods and big data, innovation and competitiveness in tourism. She is an elected member of the Executive Council of IATE, the International Association for Tourism Economics. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Emerald international peer-reviewed journal Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality. She is also on the editorial board of leading scientific journals in the field of tourism, hospitality and leisure. She has had work, research and life experiences in Italy, Ireland, England, USA, France, Switzerland.

You can visit her Google Scholar page at Serena Volo

Guest speaker

Research Associate Philipp Wegerer, 
Management Center Innsbruck, Austria



Short bio

Philipp K. Wegerer, PhD is a Research Associate at the MCI Tourism, Management Center Innsbruck. He has an interdisciplinary background in political science, organization studies, and marketing, and holds a PhD in Management from the University of Innsbruck. His current research focuses on how organizations interact with society. This includes dimensions such as visual communication, digitalization, consumer activism, and branding. His research is published in Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Organization, GJHRM, and IJRDM.