Developing a conceptual framework

This chapter addresses the main crux of conducting research. It helps the tourism students to understand what a conceptual framework is. The chapter also helps to understand where the conceptual framework fits into quantitative and qualitative research. It shows how to develop the conceptual framework. From the literature review, tourism students can get an idea of what have been used as models, theories, methodologies, hypotheses, research methods and sampling methods, among others. In deductive research, the conceptual framework is the guide for the research; it links the concepts using models and theories to test hypotheses using empirical data. The conceptual framework provides the researcher with the ability to not only describe, but, more importantly, to move beyond descriptions to explanations of the &s;why&s; and &s;how&s; of the phenomena. The complexity of a conceptual framework depends on the type of research.