Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Doctoral Tourism and Food 2014-5 Real Ireland- an Investigation into US Tourists' Holiday Photographs Sean T. Ruane Technological University Dublin Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/tourdoc Part of the Tourism Commons Recommended Citation Ruane, S. T. (2014). Real Ireland:an investigation into US tourists' holiday photographs. Doctoral thesis. Technological University Dublin. doi:10.21427/D7G89Q This Theses, Ph.D is brought to you for free and open access by the Tourism and Food at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact
[email protected],
[email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License REAL IRELAND – AN INVESTIGATION INTO US TOURISTS’ HOLIDAY PHOTOGRAPHS SEÁN T. RUANE, MSc. SCHOOL OF HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT AND TOURISM DUBLIN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Submitted for the degree of PhD Supervisors: Dr Bernadette Quinn and Dr Sheila Flanagan Advisory Supervisor: Dr Moya Kneafsey May 2014 ABSTRACT Drawing from literature straddling tourism, marketing, geography and anthropology, this thesis investigates how US tourists consume and thereby make sense of Ireland as a place through practicing photography as part of ‘being a tourist’. The constructivist approach to this research facilitated an exchange of ideas between the researcher and the participants. This exchange between the researcher and the participants, in which knowledge is not discovered, but rather created, informs the hermeneutically-situated methodologies sometimes used by constructivists. The thesis, therefore, employs a suite of participant-focused, hermeneutically-situated methodologies, including in-depth interviews and focus groups to produce a phenomenographical account of how the participants made sense of Ireland as a place.