旅游博客研究进展与启示

作为现实旅游者分享旅游经历和情感的虚拟平台,旅游博客逐渐成为潜在旅游者出游决策的参考依据,已引起学术界和旅游管理者的高度关注,成为旅游研究新的重要对象。通过对国内外旅游博客研究的相关文献的梳理,从旅游博客研究内容与研究方法两个角度进行评析。在研究内容方面,目前国内外主要从博主、博文、博客技术等3 个方面进行研究。其中,博主研究包括博主的人口学分析、博文写作分析和旅游行为分析,博文研究包括博文对潜在旅游者的作用分析、对旅游目的地形象构建的作用分析及对旅游营销的作用分析。分析结果表明,国外相关研究比较深入,而国内主要是借鉴国外研究方法进行实证研究以及旅游博客的营销作用分析。在研究方法方面,国内外主要通过网站搜集渠道进行信息获取,应用内容分析法与叙事分析法进行博客分析。最后,文章提出3点研究展望:① 在研究尺度方面,需加强不同时间和空间尺度的博文对比分析;② 研究内容方面,应拓宽研究视角,充分利用博客中的图片等有用信息,通过实地调研数据的佐证提高研究的科学性和准确性;③ 研究方法方面,国内研究应该在引介国际前沿理论和研究范式的基础上增强区域性研究,构建中国特色的旅游博客研究体系。

Progress in travel blog research and its implications

Travel blogs can provide a virtual platform of sharing travel experiences and feelings for tourists, and is becoming a reliable source of information for tourists' decision-making, which has received extensive attentions from the academia circle and tourism professionals. Thus travel blogs have become a new tourism research object. This paper attempted to make a comprehensive analysis of relevant literature regarding travel blogs from 2005 to 2012 at home and abroad. The analysis procedures and results were as follows: (1) Domestic and foreign research started relatively late, but developed rapidly. Achievements were mainly published on tourism marketing and management journals. (2) The major research contents were categorized. Bloggers, blog's content and travel-blogging techniques were the main research subjects. Firstly, the analysis of bloggers included blogger's demographic characteristics, writing of blogs, and blogger's travel behavior. Writing of blogs was analyzed in terms of writing motivation, writing time, writing skills and blog's sharing. Blogger's travel behavior was analyzed in terms of travel motivation, travel spatial behavior and satisfaction level. Secondly, the analysis of blog's content included its effect on potential tourists, image construction of tourist destinations, and tourist destination marketing. Thirdly, travel-blogging techniques were proposed to solve the problems with blog-using, including information searching, information extraction, information sharing and writing application. Foreign studies have made considerable amount of progress on these subjects, and mainly focused on blogger's travel behavior, blog's effect on destination marketing and blogging techniques. Domestic research has been only focused on blog's influence on image construction and marketing of travel destination. (3) Main research methods were analyzed comprehensively in terms of their characteristics and the insufficiency. Firstly, in the aspect of information searching methods, searching on the Internet has been widely used. The paper listed the searching websites and made a comparison between Website searching and online survey methods in term of the cost, amount of information, authenticity, integrity, operability and so on. Secondly, in the aspect of analysis methods, there were abundant methods to analyze the content of blogs at home and abroad, including word frequency analysis, semantic network analysis, discourse analysis, interpretative analysis, narrative analysis, digital ethnography analysis, phenomenology analysis, stance-shift analysis and so on, among which content analysis and narrative analysis have been most widely used. The paper also made a comparison between content analysis and narrative analysis in term of their advantages and disadvantages. (4) The paper looked into the possible directions of future development from three aspects, namely, research scales, research contents and research methods, providing references and enlightenment for further application and study. In the aspect of research scales, it was suggested that the comparative study of different scales should be enhanced. In the aspect of research contents, it was suggested that the perspective of local community should be considered, and other contents in blogs could also be analysis objects, such as pictures and videos. And the results should be complemented by field research because bloggers are not representative of all tourists. In the aspect of methods, domestic study should learn the advanced theory and research paradigm from foreign research, as well as strengthen regional research constantly, in the hope to construct China-style travel blog research system.