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This chapter examines how hospitality and tourism researchers can use ‘expressive text’ (or writing) to express the lived quality of an experience in order to ‘show what an experience is really like’ rather than ‘tell what it is like’. Expressive text refers to written language forms such as narrative, poetry and metaphor that can be used as tools in research to vividly represent the meaning and feeling conveyed in an experience. The expressive text-based approach to researching lived experience provides a textual link between experience and its expression. For this reason, it is especially useful when working with lived experience accounts of phenomenological and hermeneutic research.

The expressive text-based approach suggested here is still a relatively under explored arena within hospitality and tourism research. As a relatively under explored arena, the rich insightful knowledge that can be gained from understanding practitioner experience is rarely a central focus of scholarly writings about the workplace in hospitality and tourism contexts. However, in order to be fully appreciated as a discipline in its own right and to advance knowledge of the field, understanding the typical and significant attributes of hospitality and tourism work will be decidedly helpful.

One of the difficulties of working with lived experience accounts is finding a suitable research approach that helps to both retain the lived elements of the experience and ensure the rigour of the inquiry. An expressive text-based methodological framework that has a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophical underpinning is argued to be suitable for this purpose. Therefore, the focus of this study is to discuss such a methodology and explain the reasons for its content, style and structure in researching lived experience. The approach that is proposed here consists of a five-tiered textually expressive methodology that is employed to contextualise, portray and interpret the lived experience meanings in order to understand the significance of the experience in relation to relevant discourses in hospitality and tourism studies, and to consider implications for policy and professional practice. The guiding questions of the five-tiered framework cover the following issues: (1) What is the context of the lived experience? (2) What is the lived experience of this practice like? (3) What is the meaning of this experience for the practitioner? (4) What is the significance of the experience in contributing to the advancement of knowledge within the field? (5) What are the implications for practice and professional development?

To illustrate uses of this methodology in research, the study here includes an example showing portrayals and interpretations of the typical and significant lived nature of hospitality reception work. This shows and communicates the full meaning of the episode, circumstances or situation. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on benefits as well as tensions in working within an expressive text-based phenomenological and hermeneutic framework.

Understanding customer experience remains the holy grail in marketing and tourism theory and practice. Although research techniques continue to evolve and improve, capturing the depths of what customers experience while they experience remains an arduous task let alone what its roots are. In response, this chapter sets out and illustrates an autohermeneutic phenomenological approach that taps into the deeper levels of experience to comprehend its extremities and processes. It places experience at the center of (self-)observation and thereby grants direct access to the entire “lifeworld” experience spectrum in its ultimate and purest form from the subject's perspective (be it a consumer, a customer or a tourist) and thereby rendering a first-hand view of the deeper levels of the pre-core-post journey of experience. This thought piece advances the methodological underpinnings of experience by offering a novel perspective to researchers and practitioners. This is brought by a supporting framework composed of five methodological guidelines to examine the multifaceted characteristics of experience, starting with its inception including its twists, turns and evolvements over time, pertaining to the viscerally intensive experience realms such as tourism.

In the last two decades, there has been much research and attention on information and communications technologies (ICTs) as tools that can contribute to the economic and social lives of persons with disabilities (PWDs). However, few studies have sought to explore and document the experiences of PWDs who use these technologies to access the democratic space. Using Democratic Governance as a conceptual framework, this qualitative study seeks to address this gap in the literature by exploring the experiences of several visually impaired Caribbean youth with the use of ICTs to access the democratic space.

This study uses the qualitative research design and is guided by Husserl’s Descriptive phenomenology. The study sought to explore common patterns elicited from the specific experiences of 14 visually impaired citizens in Jamaica and 9 in Barbados through the use of semi-structured interviews.

The findings suggest that ICTs have in some ways contributed to the lives of these visually disabled youth, specifically as it relates to improving their ‘political knowledge’ and encouraging ‘political talk’. In other words, ICTs have played a contributive role in terms of including visually impaired Caribbean youth in the democratic space.

This study contributes to improving our understanding of how and in what ways ICTs can promote the inclusion of visually impaired persons in the democratic space.

This chapter presents findings from the author’s qualitative descriptive phenomenological dissertation and explores the complex decision-making processes inherent to internationalizing college and university campuses through the framework of bounded rationality. By capturing the essence of how college and university presidents describe their experiences of complex decision-making, a notable finding that emerged from the author’s study suggests that complex decision-making requires strategic decision-making approaches. Applying other decision-making strategies in complex situations empowers the decision-maker to mindfully maneuver through the intricate factors that impact choice and drive action. This chapter explores the complexity of how decisions are formulated from a strategic mindset, presents strategies and best practices, and offers recommendations that can be implemented as higher educational leaders embark on their own internationalization initiatives.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) offers management researchers an approach which allows deep examination of the relationship between individuals and their environments, particularly in complex social situations. Phenomenology studies phenomena, or things and events, as they are perceived by people's consciousness. Interpretivism allows researchers to access such internal awareness of research participants by attempting to understand the words used by subjects to describe their experiences and perceptions. Inherently subjective, this approach requires self-awareness by the researcher and the willingness to abandon preconceived notions in favor of interactive listening and exploration, relying on terms and concepts volunteered by participants rather than nominated by theory or preceding literature. Qualitative text analysis software can be utilized to facilitate aggregation and distillation of the voluminous narratives that result from the open-ended semi-structured interviews typically employed to collect data for IPA. However, impartiality and discernment on the part of the researcher remain essential in interpreting any automated analytical results. The researcher becomes in essence a second-hand observer, peering through windows voluntarily opened by participants, attempting to understand their understanding of their world.

This chapter introduces IPA, providing an overview of its rationale and approach, and illustrates its application in a management-related setting, focusing on cultural adaptation of immigrant professionals.

This chapter outlines the potential of phenomenology to illuminate how individuals experience the emotions replete within organizations. It employs one particular type of phenomenological approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The chapter considers how the hermeneutic and phenomenological foundations of this approach lend themselves to the study of affect. The chapter then clarifies and develops established IPA guidelines to render them more appropriate for research on emotions. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how IPA can produce contextualized accounts that explore the role of emotions in individuals’ experiences of organizational events and processes.

Who really teaches student teachers how to teach? Utilizing a sociology of childhood and youth theoretical framework and a descriptive phenomenology design and method, this study sought to ask children and youth about their experiences as the student teachers placed in their classroom developed classroom management skills. This study utilized questions, observations, drawings, and focus groups to address the research question: “How do children and youth in the classroom impact the experience of classroom management for student teachers?” The goal of the study was not to find instances where children or youth in the classroom assisted or negated the development of classroom management but instead, to observe if this occurred and if it did, how it occurred. In asking this question, this study extends beyond the existing literature and considers the role of children and youth in the development of classroom management for student teachers.

Key findings indicate that children and youth attempt to communicate their classroom management needs with their student teachers verbally, physically, and behaviorally. Through observations, a model emerged of behavior demonstrating increased student engagement or lack of engagement. During focus groups, participants elucidated the thoughts and or feelings behind their classroom behavior. Although drawings were collected during focus groups, this study would have benefited from more discussion with children regarding their drawings.

Although competence to live alone is typically associated with measures of activities of daily living, such measures fail to capture problematic situations that older people face in daily life. In particular, little is known about how older homebound women handle potentially harmful incidents. During a descriptive phenomenological study of the experience of reaching help quickly (RHQ) with 40 older homebound women, 33 women spontaneously reported 139 incidents (falls, “tight spots,” near-falls, health problems, and unwanted visitors) that they managed alone. The purpose of this secondary phenomenological analysis of RHQ project data was to describe the experience of those women with handling “close-calls.” Data yielded a typology of close-call incidents and five components of the phenomenon, managing a close-call. In addition to self-directed intentions to lessen the impact of each incident, there were four component phenomena relative to help-seeking, ranging from no mention of need for help (70% of incidents) to managing without desired or solicited help (6% of incidents). Contextual factors, including availability of potential helpers and access to help-seeking devices, influenced intentions in close-calls. Findings are springboards for further research and stimuli for new approaches to practice. Researchers should broaden the focus of competence assessment to take in empirical situations. Further work should be done to explore how older people appraise their status following close-calls and how they move from self-management to consideration of help-seeking and in some cases, on to active help-seeking. Because few close-calls were reported, practitioners could use our typology as an assessment protocol during routine visits. Practitioners can elicit self-management intentions relative to a particular close-call and build dialogue around those intentions, thereby bolstering ability of older women to manage close-calls effectively.

Health care services are typically viewed as institutions or agencies offering professional care or care supervised by professionals. The concept of availability of health care services involves the degree to which persons can readily find professional care. Few scholars have considered the relevance of these notions to life-circumstances of older homebound women who experience emergent situations (ES) at home such as falls, unintentional injuries, or health problems. During a larger descriptive phenomenological study of the experience of reaching help quickly, 33 of 40 homebound women, aged 85–98 years, who were living alone, reported 57 situations of interest during open-ended interviews over 18 months. The purposes of this facet of the study were (a) to describe the life-world of women who had fortuitous help with ES at home, (b) to categorize helpers involved, and (c) to elaborate the reported influence of such situations on recognizing the risk of being unable to reach help quickly in the future. Life-world was featured by having help right now from someone on the scene. We categorized involved helpers into six types, including four previously identified types of home care helpers as well as (a) “on-the-spot” helpers, acquaintances not among the woman's home care helpers and (b) “at-this-scene-only” helpers, who were not likely to encounter the woman afterwards. In these ES, the home – not the health care institution – was the setting. On-the-scene helpers served as critical health care resources. In contrast to the typical focus on availability of health care services in a public space, availability of on-the-scene helpers in the home, a private space, was critical to the well-being of these old homebound women. This work raises new notions about availability of health care services for older homebound women and offers new perspectives on the key support network concepts of proximity and frequency of contact.