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Backpackers: The next generation?
non-users of these facilities. The weakness of this method lies in the potential
limitations of the convenience sampling approach that was used to sample baby
boomer travellers. Convenience sampling, defined as “selecting those
respondents from the population who are obtainable or convenient to reach”
(Alreck, 2000, p. 43) may have portrayed a limited and potentially inaccurate
portrayal of the general travelling population and must thus be regarded with
caution. In the words of Gray (2004, p. 88), these results may be “a useful
indication of a trend but need to be treated with extreme caution”.
The data sets from the qualitative interviews and the surveys were then
compared on different levels and the results – in which the exploratory survey
did indeed appear to support the qualitative findings – are presented and
discussed in chapters four and five.
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