Multiple qualitative procedures to elicit reverse culture shock experience

Abstract

© 2019 The Author(s) This study elaborates the research design and methodology to investigate the reverse culture shock (RCS) experience of young Thai tourists in the tourism field. Taking the worldview position of relative ontology and interpretivist/constructivist paradigms, this paper employs qualitative design using multiple research methods, namely, essay writing, graph plotting and semi-structured interview. Essay writing and graph plotting are initially used as pre-interview activities as part of the memory recall procedures. This stage is important because it helps curtail memory distortion and enrich insight into the participant's past RCS experience. The semi-structured interview with young Thai tourists is subsequently conducted to elicit individual perceptual and emotional experiences and coping mechanism after they returned home. The three research methods complement one another to draw out rich travellers’ experience in the tourism study and can be beneficial to the extended disciplines of social science and psychology. Advantages of this article include: • Practical and feasible processes for a qualitative study in social science and psychology, particularly when recall of memory is involved. • The ability to gain enriched information of experience. • The ability to elicit emotional aspects from the study of experience through graph plotting.