Chapter 8 Publishing Experimental Research in Hospitality and Tourism: Some Key Insights

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.