Following the beginning of colleges and universities educating tourism courses in mid 1960s and early 1970s, it was early 1980s when graduate schools teaching tourism and hospitality were established in Korea. Albeit envisaged the quantitative growth ...
Following the beginning of colleges and universities educating tourism courses in mid 1960s and early 1970s, it was early 1980s when graduate schools teaching tourism and hospitality were established in Korea. Albeit envisaged the quantitative growth of the tourism education in number of departments and students, qualitative growth, however, was not accompanied by, thus not leading to a distinct discipline.
Many ways there will be to evaluate current status or accomplishments achieved up to now to the body of knowledges in tourism phenomena. To examine and evaluate Ph.D dissertations is one of them since doctoral dissertations are the core product of academic accomplishments by students as well as scholars teaching and supervising graduate students. Supposing those products a barometer to catch the status of Korean tourism education author surveyed most of Ph.D. dissertation submitted through content analysis. The data were collected mostly through university libraries in which hold the dissertations. The number of dissertations are 516, 82.6 percent of all the products produced between the year 2000 through the year 2008.
As expected the characteristics were found as in related specific journals. That is, data for analysis mostly tend to be collected through a direct questionnaire survey relying on nominal or ordinal measures which requires non-parametric statistics. However they are maltreated as parametric as if they could suffice all the parametric assumptions. Serious problems they face are that most of the research is biased severely toward quantitative approach, lacking an balanced efforts trapped in what one call ‘positive paradigm’. What is worse, they mostly are slated to management studies including marketing researches, neglecting to involve diverse socio-economic disciplines.
In conclusion progressive efforts are needed to accommodate other useful sciences to add to tourism knowledge, including to introduce other survey and research methods.