More on Research Layout~

During our last class, Flannery and I took some time to shape our research interests into greater details. As divergent as our interests appeared in the beginning, we actually managed to find many common grounds for our research, such as the places we shall take our observations, the people who would like to interview, or the hypothesis we anticipate in every aspect of our research.
Now, let’s get down to the specific questions we need to address in this blog post:

Research Question:
How the tourists and the natives differ within the tourism industry and how would the natives differ among themselves and how would the tourists differ among themselves?

Research methods:
* Observation of the space and people

The aspects of tourists/natives we are interested in observing:
Appearances
Behaviors
Interaction with space and people
Interaction with each other/ counterparts

* Interview
The way that we approach the interviews shall be through casual conversations, because this way people are more comfortable in expressing their thoughts and experiences. There are primarily two aspects we take interests in --- the accents and misconceptions about Amsterdam.
Accents can tell a great deal about what background does the person identifies with. Not only the tourists have foreign accents when they speak Dutch or English, the Dutch might have distinct accents among themselves depending on which part of Netherlands they live in. Therefore, distinguishing the accents among people will allow us to have a clear grasp of the tourists and native’s backgrounds and later we can focus on how their backgrounds affect their experiences in A’dam.
Another interesting fact is misconceptions. By asking what the tourists or the native think about Amsterdam, we could acquire a variety of opinions on a specific subject. For example, what does the Red Light District mean to you? By receiving different or even contradictory responses, we can go on to analyze how those misconceptions are formed and whether they should be eliminated.

*Participation
Participation in the tourists and the natives’ activities might be another intimated way to connect with their experiences. For example, we are planning to take a boat cruise and try to view the surrounding from tourists’ perspectives. We could also engage in the natives’ work within the tourism industry and try to a better understanding of how the tourism business in Amsterdam is run.
Hotspots we might set out feet on J:
Canals
Red district
Museums
Art museum
Boat tours
Coffee shops
Transportation
Restaurants
Souvenir stores