Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the movement as well as describe the tourist's routes. Usually this collection
process is expensive in time and money but with good design allows relatively
comprehensive data. However, recording a dynamic process has logistical and
philosophical problems: the former in terms of compliance times and simply
juggling the physical survey, and the latter in that the reporting itself can interfere
with the very activity being reported and its perception or recall. Thus most
surveys use either a one-off retrospective interview of movement episodes or a
diary approach allowing sequential completion of questions at certain points in
time. The typical interview can suffer from recall deficits, with the earliest events
being least well-remembered due to the greatest lag since experiencing them
(Clarke et al.
1981
; Barnard
1986
). Diaries have a lesser gap between experience
and reporting if filled regularly, but suffer more from a tendency to forget or
overlook regular reporting sessions (Unsworth and Clegg
2004
). The availability
of a range of GIS tools, along with data describing local areas and transport in
some detail, now provide an opportunity to efficiently examine and interrogate
individual journeys. Principally the component parts of each journey can be tested
for consistency with the known environment: this may involve checking that
reported times do not amount to impossible movement speeds between reported
places, reported activities comply with the local ability to sustain such a choice,
and durations at a stop are consistent with the stop and its facilities. Such an
approach can be used to ask a wide range of questions of the data and develop a
number of measures of quality, or go a step further and produce modelled (syn-
thetic) responses where a question response appears dubious or is absent.
As a context for this analysis, the chapter draws on a tourist example based on a
survey of tourist movements on the West Coast of the South Island of New
Zealand: the West Coast Tourism Flow Survey or WCTFS. Neither the field of
tourism nor the WCTFS itself is a natural choice for this analysis, but the survey
has a number of good points that recommend it, not least the size of the survey (at
2, 500 respondents, large enough to provide variety but small enough to under-
stand closely), its richness in terms of non-spatial attributes, dense data coverage
and documentation for the region, and the variety of respondents and the duration
of their trips (2-3 days being the norm). Perhaps most important is the attention
shown to the capture of the spatial element (864 locations were recorded by recall
by place name and the respondent's positioning on the map, the two approaches
being cross-referenced for robustness). The nature of the West Coast itself is also
helpful in analysis of the movements. It is a clear geographic entity, constrained by
a coastline to the West and a chain of mountains to the East that is pierced in only
three places. This channels travel in such a way that most people face relatively
clear and limited choices. The next section expands on this context and the context
of the survey methodology in depth.
