efti kicks off this Fall 2019 seminar series

Focused on academic and professional development of our students and faculty, every semester EFTI hosts a seminar series. Two of our faculty members started this Fall 2019 series in the past weeks.

On September 27, Dr. Svetlana Stepchenkova presented her study titled “Operationalization of Authenticity Orientation: A New Concept”. The study discusses authenticity in tourism, through analysis of three attitudes toward object-based authenticity presented in literature: realist, constructivist, and postmodernist. The study, conducted in collaboration with other tourism researchers in the region of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, uses two tourism settings: a museum with genuine historical artifacts, and an alternative museum where historical artifacts are recreated, reconstructed and reinterpreted. Tourists are tested in the relationship between their orientation toward object-based authenticity, the experience in the museum, and post visitation behavior. The findings show that individuals’ orientation as realist, constructivist or postmodernist affect their perception of existential authenticity depending on the setting, only impacting the recreated setting. Additionally, if the impact of existential authenticity is controlled, post-visitation behavior will not depend on the authenticity orientation.

On October 18, Dr. Heather Gibson talked in collaboration with two of her PhD candidates in a presentation titled “Thinking and Researching Qualitatively: Grounded Theory Method”. Dr. Gibson started the presentation by introducing the Grounded Theory Method, one of the most popular approaches to qualitative studies in tourism and related fields, also differentiating the three schools of thought to this theory. Hongping Zhang followed her lead, presenting her three-year long research on study abroad as a form of educational tourism. Hongping showed how her data collection evolved inductively as she identified themes and patterns in her data that were suggestive of impact of study abroad experiences on youth development. She also presented the model she constructed to reflect how study abroad experiences in the moment lead to long-term developmental outcomes through the functions of memory. Following her presentation, Yu Niu, introduced her study of older adults aging in place. Yu presented how her data collection and analysis was guided by the concept of place attachment to understand how through leisure older adults draw upon connection with their neighborhoods to not only make sense of their lives, but as an important component in their overall wellbeing. Both of the projects exemplify grounded theory from different approaches.