Tourism Management xxx (2016) 1e5

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Tourism Management
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m/ l o c a t e / t o u r m a n

The debate between empirical and broader phenomenological approaches

to research
Ziqian Song
China Tourism Academy, 9A Jianguomennei Ave., Beijing 100740, China

highlights

Examines current debate in China over research approaches.

Examines the requirement for ‘scientific integrity’ in Chinese tourism research. Distinguishes
between ‘pseudo-empiricism’ and empiricism.

article info abstract

Article history: Since the end of the nineteenth century, the discourse between positivism and phenomenology has dominated the development
Received 7 March 2016 of social science research methods. The argument is reflected in current tourism research and some scholars doubt the validity
Accepted 7 March 2016 of positivism. Here opposing views as expressed in two recent Chinese publications are examined. By analyzing the two views
Available online xxx
and their methodology, the characteristics and limitations of both positivism and phenomenology can be highlighted. Both
posi-tivism and phenomenological methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, and an integration of the two types
Keywords: of research methods is most commonly used. In some specific research methods positivistic and phenomenological methods
Tourism science
can be combined to attain more scientific knowledge. The paper also examines ‘technical rationality’, a philosophy which has
Research methodology
been criticized by many for exces-sively focusing on the tool itself and so ignoring the research object and the purpose of the
Positivism
Phenomenology study. Yet although technical rationality does derive from positivism the former cannot simply be equal to the latter. It is
suggested that the improvement of the scientific quality of tourism research is still the primary need for the development of the
tourism discipline at present. It is not possible for tourism research to become a discipline purely through inclusion in
specialized courses or existing subject content. Tourism research must become more scientific before it becomes a discipline.

© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction
In recent years, more tourism researchers are skeptical of positivism.
Thus, Li Tianyuan (Babble, 2009) and Zhang Jinshan (Hui, 2010) have
warned against excessive praise of positivism in tourism research. Similarly,
Xie Yanjun (Husserl, 2001; Li, 2010), and Zhang bin and Zhang Pengjun
(Qing, 2010) have suggested exploring the essence of tourism with
phenomenology, which they regard as the primary way in which to conduct
research, and they have sought to construct the own system of tourism studies
from that perspective. To summarize that discussion seems to tell peo-ple:
phenomenology will be the mainstream in the tourism
E-mail address: bjsngziqian@126.com.
research. Currently, it seems in the Chinese literature that few adopt both
positivism and phenomenology, and there remains a lack of theoretical
analysis for the adoption of mixed methods. In this case, it is necessary to
deepen discussion in tourism studies. Based on that premise, this paper will
combine the two theories put forward by the Chinese scholars and try to
elaborate their charac-teristics and limitations. Moreover, this paper will also
discuss the trend in tourism research methodologies.
2. The characteristics and limitations of positivism
Using Shen Baojia's concept of tourism phenomenalism as an example, in
2010, when Shen Baojia was nearly 90 years old, he published a book,
entitled “The principle of tourism - the systematic explanation of tourism
research on the Law of Motion”. In this book

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.03.016
0261-5177/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Song, Z., The debate between empirical and broader phenomenological approaches to research, Tourism Management (2016),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.03.016
2 Z. Song / Tourism Management xxx (2016) 1e5
Shen developed one of his basic points, namely: tourism is one of the
outcomes of market economy development. He said this conclusion was the
first proposition in his research life and it has subsequently directed his
research (Shen, 2010, P 4).
Shen notes in his research of the basic theory of tourism that the first
problem to be solved is the origin of tourism. In the tourism academy,
reference is made to the view that “tourism is from ancient times” (Shen,
2010, P 40). Therefore, for Shen, his conclu-sion that tourism is one of results
of market economy development is a view based on rigorous research with
positivist methodology and derived from historical study.
Shen's argument involved two complex concepts. The first is his definition
that “tourism” is better understood as the “tourism phenomenon”. Shen then
argues that the concept is basic and is a core theory in his research. This is
justified by the view that tourism is a personal activity, but in its wider context
a better way of describing the issues is to use the phraseology “tourism
phenom-enon” (Shen, 2010, P 16).
From the above summary, it can be seen that Shen never denies that
“tourism” is one of personal activities, but the “tourism phe-nomenon is one of
the productions of market economy develop-ment” and hence the total study
is premised around the “condition of tourism phenomenon production” and the
“development and operational form of tourism phenomenon.” For Shen the
under-standing of “tourism” is primarily within the “tourism phenomenon.”
The second related perspective is that Shen's “tourism phe-nomenon” is
actually “tourism as a social phenomenon”. When he discussed the question
‘what is the tourism research object?, Shen quoted Durkheim's words: “When
the sociologist tries to study a kind of social reality, he must investigate it as
an independent ex-istence, instead of studying it from specific personal
behavior.” in the other words, researchers should investigate those social re-
alities as a “thing”. The “thing” does not mean social reality or social
phenomenon had been materially created, but it means a law and that social
reality and social phenomenon have their own law, which cannot be
transformed by people's mind alone but by a wider social structure (Shen,
2010, P 14). In conclusion, Shen pointed “when we confirmed tourism is a
historical product of social development, we also confirm it is physical
attribute. We confirmed it is a ‘regular’ social phenomenon and we called it a
‘tourism phenomenon.’” (Shen, 2010, P 15).
Understanding Shen's point that “tourism is one of the pro-ductions of a
market economy development” transfers to mean “tourism as a social
phenomenon, is one of the productions of the market economy development”,
makes it easier to comprehend his whole study. Only under the market
economic system of mass production, does tourism become a kind of public
lifestyle. Or in the other words, “tourism” becomes “tourism phenomenon”. In
history, tourism was (arguably) a form of personal entertainment of travel and
leisure instead of being social phenomenon. Only when mass production and
self-consciousness become the sup-porting material and spiritual power of
social development, could tourism transfer from a time it was but a small
scale and self-supporting economy where tourism was a personal enter-
tainment into a tourism phenomenon in a market economy (Shen, 2010, P 3).
Researching “tourism” as regular social phenomenon rather than personal
activity is representative of the classical departure point of early positivists
(such as Durkheim) among the social sci-ences researchers who wanted to
locate social science research alongside a science of nature. The basic
positivism behind the re-searcher's gaze of social fact and social phenomenon
as a “thing” is seeking the ‘fact’ as the basis of research. Or, all valid
knowledge must be based on empirical facts and be confirmed by experience.
Please cite this article in press as: Song, Z., The debate between empirical and broader phenomenological approaches to research, Tourism Management
(2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.03.016
In this way, this experience is a perceptual experience that can be observed by
the public and quantified by measurement. Only in this way can tourism
research achieve scientific objective and accuracy (Tian, 2010, P 11). Some
positivists even proposed strictly sepa-rating ‘fact judgments’ and ‘value
judgments’ because the former is premised in a realism that can be confirmed
by experience but the latter is an idealistic judgment not capable of being
wholly confirmed by experience. Therefore, value judgment does not belong
within the scope of scientific research (Tian, 2010, P 24).
One of the major challenges posed by early social science is the focusing
of research on objective reality, particularly in regular social phenomenon,
which enabled social science to get rid of ambiguous concepts or value based
contradictions and thereby attain higher-consensus research achievements by
using research methodologies derived from the natural sciences. However,
there are methodological limitations that attract many critiques.
First, many have questioned whether there is an ‘objective reality’. It is
argued that it is inevitable that social scientists bring their own consciousness
into their research, and hence the ‘objective fact’ is simply their own
understanding of an objective fact. The developments of phenomenology and
postmodernism relate to these issues. Earl Babbie notes in his book “The
Practice of Social Research” that increasing numbers of philosophers are
discussing reality from a postmodern viewpoint. From this perspective
“reality” comes from their consciousness. Namely, there is no external world.
All is in an internal world (Tribe, 1997, P 10).
Second, people also suspected there is a regularity in social phenomenon.
Positivists such as Mill believed social phenomenon also has homogeneity,
but is nuanced, uncertain and hard to find. Others disagreed. They insisted that
the decisive factors that in-fluence the people's behavior or social change are
not only per-plexing and constantly changing, but also hard or impossible to
predict; while others have suggested that social research is not independent of
the object being researched, that is to say, social science theory could affect
the development of social phenomenon. It remains an open question as to
whether there are regularities of social phenomenon. Yet, even they do exist,
they may be difficult to discern and may be inhibited by patterns of wider
changes due to complex influences and a changing. Popper, although a
positivist, noted in the beginning of his book ”The Poverty of Historicism”,
that “The basic argument of this book is believing historical destiny is a kind
of superstition. Human history cannot be predicted by any ways” (Tian, 2010,
P 64).
Third, the outcomes of social science research are reduced for want of
value. For example, Husserl pointed out in his latest book, Die Krisis der
Europaischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phanomenologie, that
a modern person's whole world view is the only thing dominated by empirical
science, and also is the only thing confused by the “prosperity” of science.
This uniqueness means people avoid the crucial question of the true
humanity, almost with indifference (Xie, 2005).
Fourth, the generalization of a technical rationality leads to so-cial science
research that escapes from social practice. The technical rationality is in itself
neutral, but adverse consequences may appear from such a generalization.
This paper provides a detailed analysis in the third part of this paper.
Certainly, although the above critics have a point, it does not provide
sufficient reason to reject empirical research. For example, everyone observes
facts with personal perspectives, but there is space to be filled. To forecast the
development of society is difficult, but it cannot be denied that there are
instances when the devel-opment of specific social phenomenon has been
successfully fore-cast. Besides, positivism itself is developing. For instance,
Popper proposed “critical rationalism” when he criticized logical
 Z. Song / Tourism Management xxx (2016) 1e5
positivism, which is new stage of positivism. He proposed a research method
by which researchers investigate by continuous trials and debugging errors.
Shen based his theory on three aspects: social production, social
consciousness and social formation, which, within the premise of a market
economy, permit the tourism phenomenon to develop. This approach provide
insights of value, but issues remain due to the nature of social science
research that generates less consensus than those found in research in the
natural sciences.
One, as noted previously, is the concept of subjectivity. Shen's statement
that “tourism is the product of the development of market economy” involves
two important concepts: “tourism” and “market economy”. But some questions
persist, for example, when did recreation travel become the tourism
phenomenon, and what kind of economy is the market economy? It is difficult
to establish objective responses to these questions. For instance, in the Tang
Dynasty, many traveled, such as Li Bai, one of the most famous of Chinese
poets. Why cannot their traveling be defined as a social phenomenon?
Moreover, the rudiments of capitalism appeared in the Ming dynasty but the
‘tourism phenomenon’ did not exist as per Shen's definition. Actually, what
Shen regarded the beginning of tourism phenomenon was those tourism
activities organized by Thomas Cook. Of course, such activities were
significant as it was the first time each of tourism items in the chain of
distribution had been organized and travel agencies appeared. While today
many of the more modern tourism activities are increasingly independent,
why is it that the appearance of travel agency is the sign of the ‘tourism
phenomenon’?
The other aspect of the problem is the validity and validation of the law.
“Tourism is one of products of the market economy development”, states.
Shen, and again, “So far, in the real world, the law always works in the
production and the development of tourism.” Since the 1990s, China domestic
tourism has achieved a rapid development. But because China is a developing
country, it was inbound tourism that was the first sign of modern tourism, and
not domestic tourism, which is contrary to the general rule of tourism
production and development. Shen agreed that: “From a scientific point of
view, this is a very serious problem” and he classified such a phenomenon as
an “unconventionality of tourism”. The writer believed such an
“unconventionality” was an outcome of history because the conditions of
other countries and regions were not as same as Thomas Cook's. It remains an
untested proposition. China first developed inbound tourism as a policy choice
because it was in urgent need of foreign exchange, and there were no
conditions present within which to develop domestic tourism. The
explanatory nature of social science research is less precise than the natural
science. There is no tourism phenomenon as defined by Shen when the first
travel agency was formed in China in 1927.
2.1. Characteristics and limitations of the phenomenological
method: Xie Yanjun's tourism essentialism
Xie Yanjun has systematically researched tourism experience using
phenomenology in his doctoral dissertation in 2005. At the end of his
dissertation, he pointed out that to research travel experience, whether
studying the essence of a phenomenon or operational issues in applied fields,
people should use the phenomenological method and hold to a
phenomenological perspective as being potentially more scientific than
positivism (Husserl, 2001). In the next part of the paper, Xie's paper “The na-
ture of tourism and its recognition method – from the view of disci-pline
consciousness” published in “Tourism Tribune” in 2010, is subjected to
analysis.
In this paper, Xie mentioned one of his experiments using
Please cite this article in press as: Song, Z., The debate between empirical and broader phenomenological approaches to research, Tourism Management (2016),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.03.016
3
phenomenology method in which he had invited 5 freshmen to describe one
of their travels and had then summarised the key-words. His conclusion was
that “Tourism is a leisure experience in which people utilize their leisure time
in the other's places. In other words, the nature of tourism is a kind of
experience, the leisure time and different places separate this experience from
others and give it unique characteristics” (Li, 2010).
As Xie pointed out, this is the typical research method of phe-
nomenology. When people investigate psychology, consciousness,
experience, behavior and the essence of related behavior, he sug-gests this
kind of method is regarded as the best. Two of the main characteristics of this
method are: one is “facing the fact itself”, “facing essence”, “to restore the
generality of empirical facts to the generality of essence”. A second factor is
the emphasis on “Epoche”, trying “universal doubt”, temporarily shelving any
pre-existing factor, even the scientific concept itself. Only in this way, people
can face “essence”. In Xie's investigation, those students without a
“professional tourism education” could describe, without difficulty, their
“tourism” scenarios in consistent ways while possessing a general significance
(Li, 2010). Xie realized the “facing of essence” of tourism by using “facing the
fact itself” and “Epoche”: all pre-existing scientific concepts.
Phenomenology had been produced and developed as the reflection of
positivism. It differs from positivism, which pays attention to the “fact” and is
value-neutral. The objective of phe-nomenology is consciousness and the
target of study is “meaning-finding”. When phenomenology emerged as a
mode of study it had significant philosophical influence. Following Husserl, a
large number of scholars developed this theory in new fields and established
the well-known “phenomenology movement” in the history of modern western
philosophy. In this process, many new schools of philosophy have been
developed which constituted the trend of thought of postmodernism. In the
meantime, the meth-odology of phenomenology has had a powerful impact on
the role of positivism in social science research. Various researchers pro-
posed diverse phenomenology methodologies from their own un-derstanding,
which significantly enriched the understanding of phenomenology. However,
as a mode of philosophical thought, phenomenology cannot achieve
unification in theory, but still re-tains several problems in its approach.
The first question is: how can the “common knowledge” exist? The
method of phenomenology sets the internal-consciousness as its foothold and
regards only internal-consciousness as self-evident. However, how can the
self-evident shift to common knowledge? Phenomenology cannot answer this
question. For example, in a specific social research, communication is the
only way to acquire statements of others' experiences. However, this kind of
communication needs a priori knowledge as to what should be recognize by
both sides as the foundation of common under-standing. In this case, internal-
consciousness cannot suffice as a mode of communication. The reason is there
is not inborn a priori knowledge, which only comes from learning. This
conclusion confirms outside-observation as reasonable as assumed in
positivism.
The second question is: how to do complete Husserl's concept of epoche
and restore it to tourism research? Xu Huifu wrote his points in his book “The
method and procedure in phenomenology”: “Husserl's epoche is a complete
epoche that puts the existence of all the things into epoche, which laid the
foundation of strict science. But it is very hard to do complete epoche, even
impossible.” “As difficult as completing a sense of epoche, so too completing
a “restore” also is a beautiful “fairyland” because “restore” is partial and
remains subjective forever. In fact, since Husserl's phenome-nology, a
difficult problem needs to be solved, namely how to un-dertake “epoche” and
“restore”, and this is what really bothered
4 Z. Song / Tourism Management xxx (2016) 1e5
Husserl and his successors” (Xie, 2010). It is different with the theory of
phenomenology, its methods had less development. Especially, the “epoche”
and “restore” laid a very high requirement on its researchers, which has
limited the use of phenomenology.
In addition, the phenomenology emphasizes the research of nature and
phenomenon, and neglects the quantitative law and the forecast of a thing's
development. From the need of social decision making perspective, it
represents a deficiency.
Zhang Bin and Zhang Pengjun comment on Xie's research. They affirmed
Xie's research and noted that because Xie's “experience” is based on
psychology, he can just put the tourism “experience” into the model of “leisure
experience” and hence thereby the method cannot apply a real
phenomenological analysis to the tourism experience and its essence (Qing,
2010). But even Zhang Bin and Zhang Pengjun themselves cannot explain
how to undertake a complete phenomenological analysis and much remains at
the level of philosophical speculation.
Besides an incomplete understanding of “epoche and restore”, “common
knowledge” is another important issue bedeviling Xie's research. When he
asked college students to describe their “tourism” experience, Prof. Xie had
already provided a concept of “tourism” to those interviewees, which means
the students know what is “tourism” and all the descriptions are based on their
un-derstanding. In this way, Xie can only get the “commonsense” cognition of
“tourism”. This kind of method permits the researcher to know “the meaning
of tourism experience” but not the “essence of tourism”. As for the
methodology, we can ask: before the concept of tourism had formed, how do
we derive an understanding of the essence of tourism?
3. The orientation of tourism research methodologies
3.1. The general trend to combine positivism and phenomenology
In the past century, the controversy between positivism and
phenomenology was the key to the development of scientific phi-losophy. In
this background, the controversy of positivism and phenomenology in tourism
research is just an embodiment of the development of wider scientific
philosophy in the field of tourism.
The controversy is not a “fight” per se but an issue of conceiving fusion.
Today, “many scientific philosophers develop their ideology when they
discuss with others, sometime. It is very difficult to classify some scientific
philosophers” (Xie, 2011). Modern social scientific philosophy usually
compares positivism and phenome-nology as not only theory but
methodology. “They can be regarded as two different arrows in one hand,
each of them has different functions and then complement each other” (Tribe,
1997, P 44).
As in many social science disciplines, the general trend in tourism
research is to use both positivism and phenomenology is. As mentioned
before, phenomenology has advantages in the research of things' essences and
behaviors' meaning, and posi-tivism is useful in it being well understood in its
methods and its discernment of the causation of a thing's development.
Phenome-nology must overcome the issue of not being able to generalize, and
needs positivism's external observation as the support; positivism needs the
inner experiences revealed by phenomenology to help it explain the
consequences of concepts. Positivism cannot be used all the time, and equally
researchers cannot try to use the phenome-nological research to replace other
specific scientific research. Before and after the development of
phenomenological methods, many results obtained using positivistic
approaches. Even Xie Yanjun, who had strongly advocated the use of
phenomenology, wrote a book in 2011 entitled “Research on tourism
experience-towards an empirical science” (Xu, 2008).
Please cite this article in press as: Song, Z., The debate between empirical and broader phenomenological approaches to research, Tourism Management
(2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.03.016
3.2. Technical rationality cannot be the reason that tourism research
opposes positivism
Since scientific research based on positivism emphasizes
conceptualization and empirical testing, it leads to the utilization of
mathematical language to a large extent. This in itself is one reason why
positivism in tourism research has been questioned.
The language of mathematics is the preferred language of empirical study
because of its accuracy of description, rigor of logic and the convenience of
its tools. Even the sophistication of the mathematics used in a subject is an
important sign of the devel-opment of a given field of research. However,
when the stylization and mathematization promote the development of
scientific research, there come with these trends negative influences. For
example, the method may place too much attention on the tool itself and
ignores the research object and purpose. This is not un-typical in economics
research. In economics, positivism has held supreme and has formed a highly
formalized and technical mode of argument. In this way, the threshold of
economic mathematics has significantly improved, and many economists have
a mathematical or physics background (and one may note, Husserl, the
founder of phenomenology had also learned mathematics). On the one hand,
this kind of development pulled economics into the field of the physical
sciences thinking, and the tentacles of economics have entered into every field
of social science. Thus it is called “eco-nomics imperialism”. On the other
hand, sometimes, this devel-opment has attracted criticism from both without
and within economics.
In tourism research, Tribe warned of this “technical rationality” over a
decade ago (Zhang & Zhang, 2010). His reason was that though economics
was acknowledged to be the closest to the nat-ural sciences in social science,
one of the subsequent costs was that economics research had separated itself
from social practice to a degree and the methods developed by mainstream
economists became bound to the further development of economics and its
techniques of analysis. Technical rationality is also the reason why Zhang
Jinshan warned of “the popularity of positivism in Tourism Research”. He
thought that tourism research had already fallen into the trap of positivism.
This was especially because of the prevalence (in China) of scientism pushing
forward the development of tourism research to a high formalized and
technical approach that cannot help tourism research as a more
comprehensive social discipline (Hui, 2010).
It is undeniable that there were some examples in tourism research where,
although using skilled and “fancy” mathematical tools, the questions they
studied possessed less scientific signifi-cance or the results could have been
obtained with simpler means. As Qing Qianlong said “modeling for a model,
only makes a model: let research ignore logical reasoning and empirical
reality” (Zhang, 2011). Hui Hong also commented about the “abuse and
inappro-priate use of quantitative models” (Zhang, 2010a). However, to
associate positivism in tourism research with technical rationality is a
mistaken notion for at least two reasons.
Firstly, technical rationality is not equal to positivism. Some positivist
theorists insist value judgment should be excluded from the category of
empirical research, because they regard value judgments as not belonging to
positivism rather than deny the value of value judgments. The first step of
empirical research is refining questions from actual situations and the final
results need to be verified in situ. The development of formal and technical
argumentation research mode is inherent within the development of empirical
research, which seeks theoretical generalization and clear logic. As stated
above, it is the formal and technical argumentation mode that has greatly
promoted the development of economics. The reason why formalization and
 Z. Song / Tourism Management xxx (2016) 1e5
technicalization drew apart from practice is that they had devi-ated from the
essence of positivism. In this case, though formalization and technicalization
were the derivatives of positivism.
Secondly, tourism research remains distant from over formal-ization and
technicalization. To blame positivism for too much formalization and
technicalization is a reflection of the prevalent trend of social science research
in the field of tourism research. Yet there is little justification for tourism
researchers joining the anti-positivist faction at this time. Unlike economics
research, tourism research has not reached the same high degree of
formalization and technicalization. Mathematical tools in economics have
been con-structed a very manner consistent with strict economics thinking. In
recent years, mainstream economics researchers have basically adopted a
mathematical language and usually provide variables, functions, and
equations with economic implications in a mathe-matical analysis.
Furthermore, the economics researchers often use econometric analytical
methods based in statistical sampling. Nowadays, more tourism researchers
employ econometric methods, but few adopt mathematical analyses. If people
are wantonly opposed to positivism at this stage, tourism scientific research
could be stifled. In the operationalization of research, the way to solve the
issues technological rationality is not to reject empirical research. On the
contrary, there is a need to strengthen the application of empirical research
methods. Only those re-searchers having a deep understanding of empirical
research methods should utilize such methods.
3.3. The primary task is promotion the scientific nature of tourism research
It is necessary to enhance the scientific nature of tourism research. The
reason researchers have criticized the research methods associated with
positivism is largely because of the misunderstanding and misuse of
positivism in tourism research. For example, Li, Tianyuan refers to “pseudo
empirical” when he questioned the use of positivism in tourism research
(Babble, 2009).
In another example, the paper, “Empirical Study on the influ-encing
factors of tourist satisfaction in scenic spots based on Fuzzy-IPA”, was
published by Tourism Tribune in 2010 and the study designed a Fuzzy-IPA
analysis method for investigating the factors influencing tourist satisfaction at
scenic spots, and took Wuhu Fangte theme park as a case study in which to
explore the key determinants of tourist satisfaction with this method (Zhang,
2010b). Though the researcher regarded his paper as an example of
positivism, in reviewing this paper one can just see the conclu-sion about
those influencing factors and there is no demonstration of the validity of the
research method itself. In this case, this “empirical research” is not a real
“empirical research” but an application case. Actually, the researcher also
acknowledged one of the article's limitations was “the Fuzzy-IPA method has
not been gotten a relevant demonstration”.
To identify the true and false and false nature of empirical research would
benefit the promotion of the scientific method within tourism research.
Logically, the “pseudo empirical” cannot be the reason with which to oppose
positivism. A deeper under-standing and utilization of correct empirical
research methods is the only way to solve the problem.
Compared with the “pseudo empirical”, more attention should
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5
be paid to the issues of reliability and validity in tourism research (Zhong,
2010). However, this is more related to questions of aca-demic rigor rather
than validity of empirical research method. Furthermore, because the
empirical research method came from the physical sciences and has been a
mainstream social science research method over the long term, it is almost the
epitome of what constitutes the scientific research method. However, it is very
important to remember that Husserl's original intention was to establish a
philosophy of a strict science research and to lay the foundation for all
disciplines. As a result, it is necessary to improve the science even in the
applications of phenomenology.
If tourism wants to become a real discipline, it is cannot just rely on the
adjustment of catalogues of degrees and majors. Only when the subject
becomes a science, can it be a discipline regardless of its positivism or
phenomenology.
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Ziqian Song is a Researcher at the China Tourism Acad-emy. He
holds an undergraduate degree and Master's Degree in Tourism
Management from National Huaqiao University. He received his
PhD in industrial economics from the Graduate School of the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2005. His research
focuses on basic theory in tourism studies and tourism policy.