Your research project for level 3

Read the following guidelines to find out how to carry out your research project in this level and suggest possible topics you could work on. Post your proposals and the names of your team members.

§  Introduction

In this section, let the reader know in a few sentences what your project will be addressing. State at the outset what you are interested in researching and why. Explain how the topic of your project is related to your studies, including an explanation of how the project makes use of the knowledge you gained from your Bachelor’s Degree in Tourism.

Clearly state your research problem and break it down into a series of more specific research questions, or, whenever feasible, into hypotheses. Be sure to indicate the process by which you have arrived at the predictions you make so that you can justify your hypotheses. Hypotheses, as a rule, flow from a logical process that includes consideration of what previous research has, or has not, demonstrated.

§  Literature review

Indicate which studies have already been done on the same or related topics; which questions or hypotheses have been offered; major findings; consistencies and inconsistencies among these findings. Appropriate citations would include recent peer-reviewed articles published in regionally, nationally, or internationally recognised professional journals; books; monographs; etc.

After reviewing the literature, place your own research within a context of already existing knowledge. Is your research an attempt to retest previous research findings? Investigating some aspect(s) of previous research in greater depth? Exploring areas suggested by previous findings? Studying a problem about which little or nothing is known, but which needs to be investigated for practical or theoretical reasons?

§  Methodology

Identify your research approach (quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods) and type according to its reach (exploratory, descriptive, causal/correlational or explicative), purpose (basic or applied), design (experimental or non-experimental) and/or information sources (documentary or field research).

Specify the universe and the sample -who the subjects of your research will be and how you are going to select them. Give your reasons for choosing such a sample, bearing in mind that you should find at least 50 respondents.

Identify your procedure. Indicate which data collection tools you plan to use in addition to surveys (observation, interviews, focus group, etc.), and any relevant information about your research design. Finally, discuss how you intend to process and analyse your data.

§  Results

In this section, the research outcomes should be interpreted and presented without comments, in a balanced way. Appropriate charts and graphs should be presented either in this section or in the appendices.

§  Conclusion

This section essentially returns to section one and should present how this study answers its research questions and how it fills the knowledge gap presented in section two. This section should reveal how the results of this study match or do not match other similar research. Great care should be taken to discuss why this study is important and how the results can be used. There should be a large number of citations to aspects that have been previously mentioned in other sections of the study. There should also be a reference to the limitations of the study (e.g. unexpected challenges, constraints on generalisability, applications to practice, and/or utility of findings) and what future research ought to be undertaken.

Overtourism in Barcelona

The Guardian picture essay

How tourism is killing Barcelona - a photo essay

One of the coolest destinations in Europe just two decades ago, Barcelona is now so overcrowded it has become a tourist theme park -and is losing the character that made it so popular

by Stephen Burgen. Photography: Paola de Grenet

Thu 30 Aug 2018 06.30 BST Last modified on Mon 3 Sep 2018 13.35 BST

It’s 9am on a hot August morning and timed tickets to visit Barcelona’s emblematic Sagrada Família basilica have already sold out. Only a few years ago you could turn up and queue for maybe half an hour to get in but with the soaring numbers of visitors to the city (around 30 million last year) anyone who arrives on spec is likely to be disappointed.

Those who have tickets amuse themselves in the queue by taking selfies in front of the temple’s ornate nativity facade. Groups of tourists trail behind their lollipop-waving guides. Street vendors spread out their wares on the pavement – pirated designer sunglasses and tacky memorabilia - until a heavily-armed police patrol moves them on. At the stalls around the square you can buy soft toys, Gaudí ashtrays and Barça scarves.

Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece was begun in 1882 and is due for completion in 2026. The work was intended to be funded by penitent sinners – but there are more tourists than repenters around these days (it is the city’s most popular destination, with 4.5 million visitors in 2016), so tourists are footing the bill.

At Casa Batlló, Gaudí’s apartment building in the busy Passeig de Gràcia, the queue snakes around the corner, and this is the queue for people who have bought advance tickets at €28.50. They wait behind a sign that says “Skip the Line”. The woman at the door says the wait for people with tickets is around 20 minutes. After a pause she shrugs: “OK, perhaps more like 40.”

Barcelona remains a beautiful city, one of the most attractive in Europe, huddled between the mountains and the sea, with a wonderful climate and wealth of architecture and history. It used to pride itself on the quality of its design and was dubbed the capital of cool in the late 20th century. It is far from cool now though, and a day traipsing around the tourist hotspots reveals how it has become the home of tat, with the magic word “Barcelona” printed on any old junk, from straw hats and teddy bears to beach towels and coffee mugs. Not to mention all manner of ceramic creatures made in Gaudí’s trencadís style of broken tiles.

La Rambla is Barcelona’s most famous street but for residents it became its least-loved long ago, so crowded as to be virtually impassable for nine months of the year. From the moment it was created in the 18th century La Rambla became a place where the wealthy could flaunt their finery and the poor could hustle and everyone could breathe, outside the walls of the crowded mediaeval city. It was never chic, indeed, it was always slightly edgy and marginal – but now there is nothing but souvenir shops, interspersed by McDonald’s and shabby restaurants serving kebabs and paella a startling shade of chrome yellow.

At all hours, young men invite you sotto voce to a “coffee shop” à la Amsterdam. This is something new. At night there are prostitutes, which isn’t new, except now most of the women have been trafficked.

Last year a consortium was appointed to come up with a plan to attract residents back to La Rambla. They have consulted widely and details of the plan are expected to be published soon, but they have their work cut out.

“La Rambla is above all a business,” says Fermín Villar, president of the Friends of La Rambla, which represents the street’s residential and commercial interests. “Every year more than 100 million people walk along this street. Imagine, if each person spends only one euro.”

Itziar González, the architect who heads the symposium, says the first task is to convince people that La Rambla can be saved. “It’s not just about changing things,” she says, “it’s about changing minds.”

It’s doubtful, however, whether the Boqueria food market on La Rambla can be saved. Once a mecca for cooks and foodies where you could buy everything from truffles to edible insects, the stallholders are one by one caving in to the force majeure of tourism, with fresh fish, meat and vegetables giving way to juice bars and assorted takeaways. The very reason for visiting la Boqueria – even as a tourist – will soon cease to exist.

Barcelona is one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, with few open spaces. So when the seafront at Barceloneta was opened up in time for the 1992 Olympic Games it gave the city breathing space, just as La Rambla had two centuries earlier. It became the new place to pasear, the evening or Sunday stroll that is such a part of Spanish life.

But Barceloneta has become another no-go zone for residents as it has degenerated into a sort of urban Lloret de Mar. Lie on the crowded beach and every few minutes a vendor will offer you beer or water or a mojito, a massage, a henna tattoo and sometimes weed. Rickshaws ply the waterfront while shirtless young men whizz by on electric scooters.

The saddest thing about all this is the city is rapidly losing its identity and becoming like everywhere else. A new word has been coined to describe this apparently unstoppable process: parquetematización – the act of becoming a theme park. Barcelona has become an imitation of itself.

Read the original article with pictures at https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/aug/30/why-tourism-is-killing-barcelona-overtourism-photo-essa and post your comments.

Happy World Tourism Day!

The Tourism Alert and Action Forum has released a critical statement focused on World Tourism Day 2018. Read this extract and comment on it.

TOURISM AND DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS THIS WORLD TOURISM DAY

World Tourism Day arrives annually on September 27th. The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) seizes the moment to tout tourism as the solution to poverty, the pathway to development and the tool to empower communities. This flies in the face of the evidence from the grassroots that we of the Tourism Alert and Action Forum see every day. This year’s World Tourism Day (WTD) theme is “Tourism and the Digital Transformation”. The UNWTO proclaims:

"We know that a digitally advanced tourism sector can improve entrepreneurship, inclusion, local community empowerment and efficient resource management, amongst other important development objectives. This year’s WTD will help us to further explore the opportunities provided to tourism by technological advances including big data, artificial intelligence and digital platforms."(http://wtd.unwto.org/content/worldtourism-day-2018).

Invoking the public relations terms long favoured by tourism proponents including “sustainable”, “responsible” and “inclusive”, the UNWTO joins the bandwagon praising the arrival of digital technologies in tourism:

"World Tourism Day 2018 is a unique opportunity to raise awareness on the potential contribution of digital technologies to sustainable tourism development, while providing a platform for investment, partnerships and collaboration towards a more responsible and inclusive tourism sector."

This statement is laughable when this WTD would be better invoked with the word on everyone’s lips, “overtourism”. The digital technologies the UNWTO advocates are in part the cause of the overtourism onslaught. For instance, the digital disruptions of Airbnb and Uber are decimating neighbourhoods, making workers precarious and shirking corporate regulations. The social media apps of Instagram and facebook are increasing the almost pathological narcissism of tourists. A case in point is found in Goa, India, which has taken the step of implementing 24 “no-self zones” on its coastline as a response to deaths and casualties of selfie-taking tourists. Destinations are no longer seen as vibrant places with living and struggling communities but instead as photogenic locations holding iconic sites attractive solely for their Instagram capture-ability.

A philosophical point to address is exactly what do the UNWTO’s WTD public relations crew mean by “sustainable tourism development”? The term sustainable is problematic and has been abused for years as a cover for the irresponsibility and unsustainability of tourism. Almost universally, tourism practices have been geared to growth and it is clear that ceaseless growth on a finite planet is not possible. These words could be more accurately rearranged as ceaseless development to sustain tourism.

(Full statement available at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/TourismAlertAndActionForum)

Ready for Level 3?

Welcome to Level 3!

In this introductory session you're required to carry out two production tasks.

1. Written expression. Write a story in pairs using as many as the following words as possible:

-Actually

-Career

-Despite

-Regardless of

-Had she/he only known

Swap your texts with another pair after 10 minutes and go on writing them until all of you have contributed to all the stories. Use your imagination and be creative!

2. Oral expression. Rank the following concepts according to your personal priorities in life:

-Family

-Friends

-Health

-Money

-Politics

-Romance

-Sex

-Sport

-Studies

-Work

Make a list individually and then compare it to other students' choices to reach a consensus and create a single list. Once you've finished, join another pair to follow the same process and come up with a single list you all agree with. Provide arguments for this pyramidal discussion until all the class produces a common ranking.

Job interviews

Think about today’s job interview simulations. Consider each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses and post your feedback comments.  You may take the following aspects into account:

-Language use (grammar/vocabulary accuracy, range & adequacy)

-Task achievement (efficient achievement of communicative purpose, content relevance & extent)

-Fluency & pronunciation (speech flow, intonation, stress & rhythm)

-Communicative resources (use of linguistic and non-linguistic resources, supporting material, attitude)

§  

§  

Getting to your Research Questions

Read these guidelines from Dr. Vikneswaran Nair (Dean, Professor and Researcher at the University of The Bahamas). Then write your own research questions and objectives.

To come up with optimal research questions first be clear with what is the title of your research all about (at least your working title).

You may not know right away what your research question is. Gather information on the broader topic to explore new possibilities and to help narrow your topic.

•     Choose an interesting topic. If you’re interested in your topic, chances are that others will be, too. Plus researching will be a lot more fun!

•        Gather background information (do a good literature review).

•        Ask yourself:

- What subtopics relate to the broader topic?

- What questions do these sources raise?

- What do you find interesting about the topic?

- Who would be interested in the issue?

After choosing a topic and gathering background information, add focus with a research question.

•        Explore questions:

- Ask open-ended “how” and “why” questions about your general topic.

- Consider the “so what” of your topic. Why does this topic matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

- Reflect on the questions you have considered. Identify one or two questions you find engaging and which could be explored further through research.

•        Determine and evaluate your research question:

- What aspect of the more general topic you will explore?

- Is your research question clear?

- Is your research question focused? (Research questions must be specific enough to be well covered in the space available.)

- Is your research question complex? (Questions shouldn’t have a simple yes/no answer and should require research and analysis.)

•        Hypothesize. After you’ve come up with a question, consider the path your answer might take:

- If you are making an argument, what will you say?

- Why does your argument matter?

- How might others challenge your argument?

- What kind of sources will you need to support your argument?

In short the research questions must be relevant, manageable in terms of research and in terms of your own academic abilities, substantial and with original dimensions, consistent with the requirements of the assessment, clear and simple and interesting.

Choose a research topic

The research project is a key task in level 3. Read the following guidelines to find out more about it and suggest possible topics you could work on.

§  Introduction: The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of the project. The subject of study, the context in which it was carried out, the objectives and the research questions must be clearly formulated.

§  Theoretical framework: The conceptual framework can include a literature review on the topic studied. The theoretical and/or practical background of the topic and previous investigations should be identified, along with related theories and key concepts.

§  Research design: The methodological approach must be described, as well as the research instruments used, how data were collected, and how processing and analysis were planned.

§  Results: The results obtained by means of the data collection instruments must be presented graphically.

§  Conclusions: In this final section the initial research questions must be answered. Moreover, this section must show to which degree the set objectives have been achieved, and the whole project must be evaluated. The limitations of the study and unresolved issues must also be stated. Lastly, possible future research lines must be proposed.

§  References: The bibliography used to develop the project may be mentioned.

Ready to start your research projects? Post your topic proposals and the names of your team members.