Tourism taxonomy: An epistemological analysis with Concept Elucidation technique

The problem of term-meaning incompatibility and groundlessness in tourism theory has been the main starting point of this research. The main purpose thereby is to develop a scientific technique for the solution of the problem and thus a classification model. In this context, grounded theory, one of the qualitative research methods, has been used. The literature bases are compared with the opinion of the participant academicians obtained by the structured interview method and have been examined epistemologically with the concept explanation technique. According to the results obtained, (1) tourism concepts can be evaluated systematically, (2) tourism type designations sometimes do not reflect the reality of being a type. It is thought that if they are used together, the elucidation technique and the Hierarchical Tourism Taxonomy model can be used as an evaluation tool for tourism type taxonomy.