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Critical Analysis And Further Research Plan:. Moorhouse

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Critical Analysis and Further Research Plan: Moorhouse et al. (2015): “The Customer Isn’t Always Right – Conservation and Animal Welfare Implications of the Increasing Demand for Wildlife Tourism” 1) Critical Analysis Introduction In the above paper, Moorhouse et al. aim to independently assess different types of non-consumptive Wildlife Tourist Attraction (WTA), excluding zoos, for their implications on species conservation and welfare. They also compare the opinions of visitors to the attractions, using reviews left on TripAdvisor, with the results of their review. The general conclusion of the study is that WTAs have many negative effects that tourists are unaware of and that there is a need for much better public education on this …show more content…

(2015) assigned separate conservation and welfare scores to each WTA type that they identified. They then assigned tourist dissatisfaction scores to each WTA type based on tourist reviews on TripAdvisor. They used these results to compare tourist opinion to the genuine conservation and welfare statuses of the attractions. Analysis of Results With relation to the current research in its field, this study by Moorhouse et al. (2015) presents a particularly new view and there is very little that it can be effectively compared to. Tourist dissatisfaction scores were assigned as percentages and were not distinguished between conservation and welfare. These scores were set next to each other in a table that allowed clear comparison, though not all WTA types had sufficient tourist review data for a percentage dissatisfaction score. This significantly reduces the number of WTAs that have been used to conclude a low dissatisfaction percentage. In addition, it brings in to question the reliability of TripAdvisor as a source for assessing tourist opinion - 9 of the 24 WTA types were not given a dissatisfaction score. TripAdvisor also may present a level of bias, since tourists self-select, therefore strong positive or negative opinions may be favoured. As suggested in the paper, this bias may be partially avoided by an in situ questionnaire style investigation, though perhaps not entirely. Upon examination of the S1

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