1. Quantitative Methods, Applications, and Trends in Asian Tourism Research

This chapter states the purpose and goals of the entire book covering the status and future directions of quantitative tourism research in Asia. As an introductory part, this chapter describes the scope of the book and provides a brief explanation and summary of chapters. As such, this chapter highlights the research paradigm, philosophy and design, and other quantitative-specific dimensions before intruding on each chapter. The chapters of the book are divided into 3 main parts including understanding tourism industry in Asia (Part I), the current status of quantitative techniques (Part II), and future directions for Asian tourism researches (Part III). In fact, the introduction chapter implicitly discusses how tourism context might be different from the other settings and argues that the creation of knowledge even in quantitative data analysis to some extent is context dependent. Therefore, this chapter discusses an overview of data analysis strategies that is often overlooked by researchers.