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Abstract

Time is scarce for most tourists. This posts challenges for fieldworkers when conducting face-to-face interviews with them. This is particularly pertinent to Chinese tourists. This paper explores the use of the social media app WeChat for mitigating the time pressures faced by researchers and tourists as subjects. Hugely popular in China, WeChat has rarely been explored within the literature as a tool for data collection. This paper addresses this dearth by taking an ethnographic approach and using our experiences and reflections on the multiple challenges we faced, particularly, but not exclusively on the limited time of Chinese travelers in Tasmania, Australia. This paper contributes to tourism methodology by critically assessing the potential use of WeChat for researchers. It extends the understanding of using social media as tools for qualitative data collection, and simultaneously considers the enhancement of the researcher’s wellbeing.

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Ma, Yue and Hardy, A and Ooi, CS
Keywords:	WeChat, Chinese tourists, data collection, qualitative research, reflexivity
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of China Tourism Research
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	1938-8160
DOI / ID Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/19388160.2019.1607794
Copyright Information:	Copyright 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Related URLs:	Google Scholar: Hardy, A UTAS Profile: Hardy, A Google Scholar: Ooi, CS UTAS Profile: Ooi, CS
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