Nika Balomenou

Swansea University | SWAN · School of Business and Economics

Photography has often been considered tainted as a source of research data, even in tourism, its natural habitat. This situation is undoubtedly a legacy of the prejudice that many social scientists held toward the use of visual data when the academic study of tourism took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Tourism research has therefore persistently favou...

Tourists’ photographs can be a rich database for researchers wishing to study tourists’ perceptions and attitudes towards destinations. Such data can also be useful in examining how tourists behave, where, when, with whom and why. Many researchers favour the qualitative analysis of such data, which requires the use either of relatively small number...

This article makes a systematic review of the use of participant-generated image methods in social science research. Such methods have a long history of application across the social sciences. Their development has, however, been uneven and fragmented, resulting in a lack of gestalt (wholeness or unity). This has led to the methods being underappre...

More effective tools are needed to empower stakeholder participation in tourism planning processes, and volunteer-employed photography (VEP) is a promising option. This paper discusses the use of VEP to inform tourism planning on St David's Peninsula in Wales. Locals and tourists were given cameras and photo diaries, and asked to use VEP to comment...

This second volume examines detailed methodological examples of visual concepts and their use and value in advancing knowledge and understanding of tourism beyond business and economics. The 17 chapters that make up this book can be divided into four separate but interconnected methodological categories: semiotics/symbolism; visual sociology/photo-...