INSTRUMENTOS Y ESCALAS

The first strategy was to restrict the in-depth interviews to staff at the

universities of Bath and Lancaster who, although not on holiday at the time of the interview, had taken holidays to a variety of destinations recently. I then supplemented these staff interviews with shorter interviews with tourists who were actually on holiday in the Lake District and Exmoor. These interviews retained a conversational format and covered similar themes to the in-depth interviews, but were more closely tailored to the ways in which food and drink interacted with place in that particular study area.

The rationale behind this dual approach was that the staff interviewees had the time needed to participate in a longer interview session and to reflect on a variety of holiday experiences that were fresh in their minds. They could also be selected by holiday type and occupation (e.g. cleaner, secretary, lecturer, etc.) to ensure that I gained access to information about as a wide a range of holiday food experiences as possible. By contrast, the current tourist

interviews – although shorter in duration – supported the themes developed in the in-depth interviews and provided valuable additional information about the

ways in which food and tourism were interacting in the specific context of the study areas.

In order to develop meaningful answers to my research questions, I also had to decide which tourists and university staff to interview. This study argues that food and tourism are highly context sensitive and there are therefore, at the most detailed level, as many types of tourist experience as there are tourists. However, because it was impossible to interview everyone, I had to develop a meaningful sampling strategy.

Tourists can be classified and sampled by a number of characteristics, such as age, income, family status, destination, type of holiday, type of

accommodation etc., all of which can affect their perceptions of food and tourism to a greater or lesser degree (Mason, 2002). As described in Chapter 2, both eating and travelling involve questions of taste and distinction as well as financial considerations. Indeed, according to Bourdieu: (1984) “the

distribution of the different classes (and class fractions)… runs from those who are best provided with both economic and cultural capital to those who are most deprived in both respects” (Bourdieu, 1984 p.114). I therefore had to select interviewees in a way that accounted for their varied financial and cultural resources, and I incorporated this into my sampling strategy in two ways.

For the in-depth staff interviews, I used occupation as the basis for my sampling strategy so that, at each university, I aimed to interview five

professors/lecturers, five administrative/secretarial staff and five manual workers such as cleaners, porters and maintenance staff. These groups correspond to very different income levels, with lectureship and professorial salaries ranging from £27,465 to over £50,000, administrative grades earning between £13,339 and £21,682, and manual workers earning from £11,691 to £13,659 (Lancaster University, 2007). They are also associated with very different levels of formal education and qualifications. Within these groups, I selected staff at random using the online email lists of departments that were not likely to influence their employees’ views on food or tourism, such as biological sciences, education and management. I then contacted potential respondents by email to explain my study and ask if they would be willing to participate, while also aiming for a balance of men and women. As a

secondary selection strategy, I asked volunteers to list the dates and destinations of their last three holidays so that I was able to select

respondents with as wide a range of holiday experiences as possible. This ranged from those who enjoyed seeking out new and different foods to those who self-catered using food brought from home; and from those who had visited far-flung places to those who had stayed within the UK or who liked to visit well-developed Mediterranean resorts. Thirty-seven respondents were contacted and this resulted in a total of 29 participants, with eight of those contacted being unable to help me. However, non-response bias was not problematic here because no one refused to take part (the eight non-

practical reasons3). Profiles of all 29 interviewees can be found in Appendix 1, while interview schedules are given in Appendix 2.

There was a danger that, by asking for volunteers, I would attract only those with a penchant for ‘exotic’ foods and holidays and, as a result, I was careful to emphasise that I was happy to hear from anyone – including those who took holidays in the UK or for whom food was not an important part of the trip. This strategy proved successful as I received several emails from potential respondents who felt that they would not be sufficiently ‘interesting’ for my study because they tended to self-cater or opt for UK destinations. However, I reassured those concerned that their contributions would be valuable and, in every case, I was able to convince them to take part.

Before commencing the interviews at Lancaster and Bath, I also piloted the interview schedules with staff at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) in Preston. These interviews proved that the main logic of my questioning was working well and enabled me to become more practiced at using my interview schedule and recording equipment before work began on the main

interviewing programme.

The second part of my strategy involved shorter, qualitative interviews with tourists holidaying in my study regions. These interviews differed from the pre- arranged, one-to-one staff interviews in that the majority of tourists

encountered were with friends or family at the time. As a result, I encouraged

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Four were physically unavailable at the time of the interviews due to being on holiday or sabbatical, two were too busy with work and two were unable to help due to not having taken

all group members to participate in the discussion wherever possible. This proved effective because, not only did people appear more relaxed when discussing their holiday food as a group, they were also able to use each other’s ideas to stimulate their own feelings on the subject, thus giving me access to a wider range of opinions than if I had interviewed only individuals. This method also showed how groups, rather than individuals, made their eating decisions – whether one person dominated the decision-making process, for example, or whether a consensus emerged.

As these interviews were not pre-arranged, I was unable to select participating tourists in advance, as I did with the in-depth interviews. Even if it had been possible to do so, selecting individuals by occupation would have been

unsuitable for these interviews because, amongst the general public, salaries and qualification levels cannot be deduced from a person’s occupation as accurately as they can in a university context where job types are linked to a fixed pay scale and particular levels of qualification. This time, therefore, I asked interviewees to tell me what type of accommodation they were using so that I was able to conduct interviews with the following groups:

 Visitors choosing relatively cheap or low-social-status forms of

accommodation; e.g. youth hostels or holiday camps, such as Butlins at Minehead.

 Visitors choosing forms of accommodation associated with average prices and levels of social status; e.g. those staying in standard hotels or bed and breakfast accommodation. I also included those who were camping or caravanning in this group on the grounds that the majority

of people choosing such accommodation were families who described staying on well-equipped sites that offered relatively good levels of comfort and privacy.

 Visitors choosing expensive, high-social-status forms of

accommodation. These interviews were targeted at those staying in what I described as ‘smart hotels’ – i.e. three-star establishments offering a wide range of facilities and a high level of comfort.

 For the Lake District only, I added a fourth category of ‘luxury hotels’, which I defined as those that were listed as four-star and above. However, I was unable to replicate this category on Exmoor because, as described in Section 3.3, Exmoor’s less-developed tourist industry did not support any four-star establishments. There was thus an extra level of luxury available to tourists visiting the Lake District.

Like occupation, accommodation type is not a perfect way of accounting for a person’s financial or cultural resources because tourists may choose to stay somewhere that is above or below their ‘normal’ choice of provider. The wealthy, for example, may decide to go camping while lower income groups may choose to ‘splash out’ on an expensive hotel. It is also likely that there will be a variation in standards and prices within the categories listed above. However, this approach remained effective in assessing some of the main differences in tourists’ financial and cultural resources. It was also practical to operationalise within the field because, when interviewing, I was able to ask tourists what kind of accommodation they were using. Furthermore, I was able to access different groups by conducting my interviews in a variety of locations

– for example, by getting permission to interview in the residents’ lounge or bar area of youth hostels and luxury hotels.

Choosing where and when to interview required considerable thought – not only because I wanted to access tourists across a wide range of financial and cultural resources, but also because I wanted people to be in an environment where they felt sufficiently relaxed to give thoughtful answers to my questions. It was clear that accosting people on a busy shopping street or in a noisy car park was not going to be conducive to the kind of discussion I wanted to have and, as a result, I developed a strategy that was based around locations where people were relaxed and happy to talk. In practice, this meant

conducting daytime interviews with tourists who were sitting and relaxing on park benches, sea walls and village greens. Bus stops were also useful as tourists were often glad of the diversion while they waited. However, when targeting those staying in youth hostels or luxury hotels, I found that early evenings were the best time to catch people and, having got permission from the proprietor, I would speak to tourists who were relaxing in the bar or lounge before dinner.

Before commencing the interviewing process, I spent several days in each study region which enabled me to select the most fruitful locations for the interviews. During this time, I was also able to conduct pilot interviews with visitors available on those days. The pilot interviews revealed that, although my question topics were working well, I needed to think carefully about the

audibility of the recorded interviews – particularly those conducted outside (see p.126).

My initial aim was to conduct 10 interviews within each category for each study region. In practice, I exceeded this number because it was sometimes difficult to predict which group the tourists would belong to before I began talking to them. This resulted in a total of 78 group interviews being conducted. However, by doing more interviews it became clear that I had arrived at the point of ‘theoretical saturation’. “This point is reached when your data begin to stop telling you anything new about the social process under scrutiny” (Mason, 2002 p.134). Therefore, later interviews revealed less new information and tended to repeat sentiments expressed by previous

interviewees.

As I have described, this dual interviewing strategy was helpful in two ways. Firstly, from a practical perspective, the in-depth interviews with university staff helped me to overcome the constraints imposed by the brevity of the interviews with the tourists in the study regions. Secondly, by interviewing university staff about their experiences of holiday food across a broad range of both domestic and international destinations, I was able to develop a more generalised understanding of how people understood and related to food on holiday, and this provided an important grounding for my more specific investigation of how local food and place were related in the contexts of my study areas. However, no selection strategy can be perfect and it is also important to acknowledge the weaknesses of this dual approach. Firstly, in

relation to the interviews with university staff, it could be argued that the 29 people interviewed comprised a small and somewhat specific sample. In particular, the fact that those interviewed were working in a university could imply that they might be inclined to have rather different values and ideals to those encountered in alternative contexts, such as private sector employees working in sales or the financial sector, for example. This applies particularly to the academic staff, who might be viewed as examples of the ‘intellectuals’ described by Bourdieu (1984), and who may have given different answers on account of this. However, there were also limitations inherent in the interviews with the Lake District and Exmoor visitors. The main problem with these interviews was that they were, of necessity, short interviews of 15 minutes or less. As a result, although I would always ask people to reflect on how their current holiday compared to other holiday food experiences that they had had in the past, the amount of contextual information yielded by these interviews remained limited and it was sometimes hard to judge how a person’s attitudes to food made sense, both in terms of their overall holiday histories and also in terms of their more general personal experiences and lifestyles. This meant that I had to be careful not to draw too many inferences from the limited contextual information available when interpreting the data.