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This study aims to systematically review a total of 513 papers using experimental methods in hospitality and tourism research and then proposed new recommendations to address approaches that have been confusingly adopted or ignored in the current literature.

An extensive literature review was conducted. Together with critiques on previous studies, four recommendations were proposed to help carry out future experimental studies using more rigorous and exact approaches.

Multiple experimental studies can provide stronger evidence for theoretical arguments. Demonstration of the theoretical underlying mechanism using evidence based on mediation and moderating methods is required. The adoption of complementary methods can mitigate the generic weaknesses of experimental methods. In addition, enhancement of the realism of experiments is required to obtain stronger empirical evidence with internal and external validity.

This study proposes four constructive recommendations which help researchers to conduct future experimental design studies correctly. Valid and exact research outcomes can help practitioners to carry out new useful marketing strategies.

After reviewing 513 previous papers that used experimental design in the hospitality and tourism fields, this study proposes four new recommendations to facilitate a better understanding of experimental design. The original and innovative nature of this study will help future investigations to adopt more accurate statistical approaches.

Experimental economics has been treated with skepticism by some Austrian economists. We argue that experimental methods are consistent with strong versions of praxeology, and are therefore not methodologically problematic for Austrians. We further argue that experimental research methods have illustrated many uniquely Austrian themes and provide a fruitful method for future Austrian-inspired research.

John and Storr (this volume) make the case that quantitative methods help establish whether culture matters, but do not tell us how culture matters. To better understand how culture matters, social scientists must use qualitative methods like interviews, in-depth case studies, and archival research. Currently, experimental economists engage qualitative methods through the coding of “chat” transcripts and informal talks with subjects while payments are arranged. Experimental economists do this because they know that it is a good idea to talk to the people they seek to understand and learn from their thought process. The goal of this chapter is to build on the insights from John and Storr about the importance of qualitative work and to provide experimental economists with some concrete ideas about qualitative methods that can improve their research.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how intervention research weighed in nonintervention research in the field of human resource development (HRD) by examining the number, citation frequency and use of experimental studies in HRD academic journals.

A total of 2,700 articles published between 1990 and 2014 from Advances in Developing Human Resources (ADHR), European Journal of Training and Development (EJTD), Human Resource Development International (HRDI) and Human Resource Development Quarterly (HRDQ) were reviewed and analyzed to identify 91 experimental studies in the field.

The total citation frequency of the 91 articles was 1,100 (14 from ADHR, 222 from EJTD, 56 from HRDI and 808 from HRDQ). The authors reviewed the 1,100 subsequent studies that cited 91 experimental research studies and coded them to identify the research methods that each article adopted and to determine whether the studies used the citation to make causal statements. As a result, the authors found 459 causal statements from 1,100 citations. In particular, they identified the citation frequency of the causal statements used in nonintervention research to examine how often nonintervention studies used causal statements from intervention studies.

The results of the citation frequency could be different according to the search engines and timeframes. Books, technical reports, non-English studies, non-academic articles and inaccessible articles were not considered in this study. Theoretically, this study aimed to illuminate the magnitude of HRD experimental research conducted over 25 years and to what extent it influenced non-experimental studies. In addition, this study emphasized the importance of using the causal statements from experimental research to improve empirical validation in other studies.

When HRD practitioners need to identify alternative interventions to replace previous ones or to justify the use of specific interventions, they could consider causal statements from empirical studies as valid evidence. Further, HRD practitioners might collaborate with researchers to receive more direct and relevant information from experimental research.

Significantly, this study provides an integrative review of experimental research conducted in the field of HRD in terms of the number, citation frequency and proportion of using experimental research. An additional contribution is that it summarizes the research methods used in HRD studies over 25 years.

Investigates the potential of demand artefacts in country‐of‐origin studies using three alternative methodological approaches: hetero‐method replication, non‐experiment and post‐experimental inquiry. The results converge in their support of the plausibility of demand artefacts in the single and multi‐cue list format conditions. However, in the multi‐cue ad format condition, demand artefacts are found to be a less plausible alternative explanation for the experimental results. Discusses the implications of these results and future research directions.

Experimental design has long been used by psychology and consumer behavior researchers to examine causal effects of interventions on human responses. However, it remains underutilized in hospitality and tourism research. Furthermore, problems in design, implementation, and report of results were identified in previous hospitality and tourism publications. It is imperative to equip hospitality and tourism experimenters with sophisticated and state-of-the-art knowledge about experimental design, and to draw their attention to some crucial, but easily neglected, issues in designing the experiment and writing the experimental research paper. Given these reasons, this book chapter discusses some key issues in experimental design and provides corresponding insights related to the sections of introduction, literature review, hypothesis, method, analysis, and results in an experimental research paper, while the uniqueness of hospitality and tourism is considered. It is expected that the chapter will be useful for hospitality and tourism researchers to plan, conduct, and report their experimental studies in the future.

Ensuring the early detection of structural issues in aircraft is crucial for preserving human lives. One effective approach involves identifying cracks in composite structures. This paper employs experimental modal analysis and a multi-variable Gaussian process regression method to detect and locate cracks in glass fiber composite beams.

The present study proposes Gaussian process regression model trained by the first three natural frequencies determined experimentally using a roving impact hammer method with crystal four-channel analyzer, uniaxial accelerometer and experimental modal analysis software. The first three natural frequencies of the cracked composite beams obtained from experimental modal analysis are used to train a multi-variable Gaussian process regression model for crack localization. Radial basis function is used as a kernel function, and hyperparameters are optimized using the negative log marginal likelihood function. Bayesian conditional probability likelihood function is used to estimate the mean and variance for crack localization in composite structures.

The efficiency of Gaussian process regression is improved in the present work with the normalization of input data. The fitted Gaussian process regression model validates with experimental modal analysis for crack localization in composite structures. The discrepancy between predicted and measured values is 1.8%, indicating strong agreement between the experimental modal analysis and Gaussian process regression methods. Compared to other recent methods in the literature, this approach significantly improves efficiency and reduces error from 18.4% to 1.8%. Gaussian process regression is an efficient machine learning algorithm for crack localization in composite structures.

The experimental modal analysis results are first utilized for crack localization in cracked composite structures. Additionally, the input data are normalized and employed in a machine learning algorithm, such as the multi-variable Gaussian process regression method, to efficiently determine the crack location in these structures.

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology combining experimental and inquiry methods used for software usability evaluation. The software product of LeViS project funded by the European Commission (Socrates/Lingua II) is used as an evaluation paradigm. The aim of the paper is twofold: to present the results of the usability evaluation using this software as an example and to suggest a number of improvements for the next version of the software tool; and to portray the advantages of combining methods from different evaluation approaches and the experiences from their application.

The evaluation for this experiment combined different usability methods, both experimental and inquiry ones. More specifically, the methods employed were the Thinking Aloud Protocol and the User Logging, which were performed in a usability evaluation laboratory, as well as the inquiry methods of Interview and Focus Group.

In this study, usability problems regarding the Learning via Subtitling (LvS) educational software were revealed as well as issues regarding the use of Thinking Aloud Protocol method and involving users with a specific profile. The research findings presented in this paper constitute an innovative and effective methodology for software usability evaluation and are useful for laboratories aiming to conduct similar evaluations.

Although this methodology has been successfully applied for over 20 software products, due to practical purposes related to this paper's extent, only one software is used as an example.

Through the evaluation process, apart from discovering certain usability problems related to the software, there are a number of important conclusions drawn, regarding the methods used and the methodology followed in software usability evaluation.

This paper aims to examine the prevalence and trend of experimental research in hospitality and tourism. Hospitality and tourism researchers have long been encouraged to increase their use of experimental designs. However, a solid support for such advocacy is lacking, and the present paper fills in this research gap.

By using a systematic approach, this study reviews 161 tourism and hospitality articles and conducts content analysis based on certain criteria including journal outlets, Social Sciences Citation Index journals, years of publication, contexts, disciplinary foci, experimental designs, settings, number of independent variables, number of studies per article, manipulation methods, manipulation check, research subjects, sample size, subjects per experimental condition, statistical analyses and provision of effect size. The criteria between hospitality and tourism publications are also compared.

Findings show that the number of experimental publications has significantly increased over the past decade, especially in hospitality publications. Nonetheless, there is still room for improvement in applying the experimental design in hospitality and tourism research.

Researchers in hospitality and tourism are recommended to report manipulation check results and the effect size of statistically significant results, as well as to devote more effort to knowledge accumulation and methodological advancement of experimental designs.

This study is the first to review experimental research in hospitality and tourism. The findings of this study provide significant implications and directions for hospitality and tourism researchers to conduct experimental research in the future.

This study aims to demonstrate the numerical application of differential quadrature (DQ) methods and show the experimental application of free vibration analysis of fiber-metal laminated composite (FML) plates with various boundary conditions.

The FMLs are hybrid structures consisting of fiber-reinforced polymer matrix composites such as carbon, glass, aramid and different metal sheets, and are currently widely used in the automobile, aircraft and aerospace industries. Thus, free vibration analysis of these hybrid materials is necessary for the design process. The governing equations of motion are derived based on the classical plate theory. The DQ, generalized DQ (GDQ) and harmonic DQ (HDQ) differential quadrature methods have been used to solve the governing equations of an FML composite plate numerically. The accuracy and convergence of the numerical model have been verified by comparing the results available in the published literature with the results obtained from these methods. Moreover, an experimental procedure has been performed in order to compare the results against those of the numerical methods.

It is noteworthy that a high degree of similarity and accuracy was observed between the numerical results obtained by the DQ methods and the experimental results. Thus, the present study validates the applicability of the DQ methods for designing the FML composite plates.

In this study, the advantages of the DQ methods have been demonstrated differently from previous studies on the vibration analysis of the FML plates.