Time is scarce for most tourists. This posts challenges for fieldworkers when conducting face-to-face interviews with them. This is particularly pertinent to Chinese tourists. This paper explores the use of the social media app WeChat for mitigating the time pressures faced by researchers and tourists as subjects. Hugely popular in China, WeChat has rarely been explored within the literature as a tool for data collection. This paper addresses this dearth by taking an ethnographic approach and using our experiences and reflections on the multiple challenges we faced, particularly, but not exclusively on the limited time of Chinese travelers in Tasmania, Australia. This paper contributes to tourism methodology by critically assessing the potential use of WeChat for researchers. It extends the understanding of using social media as tools for qualitative data collection, and simultaneously considers the enhancement of the researcher’s wellbeing.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	WeChat, Chinese tourists, data collection, qualitative research, reflexivity
Research Division:	Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Research Group:	Tourism
Research Field:	Tourist behaviour and visitor experience
Objective Division:	Commercial Services and Tourism
Objective Group:	Tourism services
Objective Field:	Socio-cultural issues in tourism
UTAS Author:	Ma, Y (Dr Yue Ma)
UTAS Author:	Hardy, A (Associate Professor Anne Hardy)
UTAS Author:	Ooi, CS (Professor Can Seng Ooi)
ID Code:	132299
Year Published:	2020 (online first 2019)
Web of Science® Times Cited:	9
Deposited By:	Office of the School of Social Sciences
Deposited On:	2019-05-02
Last Modified:	2021-05-24
Downloads:	0