Chapter 9 Qualitative Analysis of Social Media Historical Data: A Case Study of Twitter and Tourism Boycotts

Social media is noted for its usefulness and contribution to destination marketing and management. Social media data is particularly valued as a source to understand issues such as tourist behavior and destination marketing strategies. Among the social media platforms, Twitter is one of the most utilized in research. Its use raises two issues: the challenge of obtaining historical data and the importance of qualitative data analysis. Regarding these issues, the chapter argues that retrieving tweets using hashtags and keywords on the Twitter website provides a corpus of tweets that is valuable for research, especially for qualitative inquiries. In addition, the value of qualitative analysis of Twitter data is presented, demonstrating, among other things, how such an approach captures in-depth information, enables appreciation and inclusion of the nonconventional language used on social media, distinguishes between “noise” and useful information, and recognizes information as the sum of all parts in the data.