Health, Wellness and Tourism: healthy tourists, healthy business ...

chosen as the research target. Although expatriates 7 represent a high proportion in the foreign
patient market share in private hospitals generally, they are not selected here simply because
they do not travel to Thailand for medical care and are not representative sample of actual
medical tourists. The countries mentioned are selected since they represent a significant group
of total medical tourists. Approximately 150 patients, or about 75 patients from each country
will be sought for the questionnaire study to generate a representative sample as equally as
possible in terms of nationality and gender. These countries additionally provide a
comparative study of two different continents in terms of cross-cultural study with similar
Western background in order to compare their motivations for visiting a Thai private hospital.
Questionnaire survey
Interviews with medical tourists
Piloting the questions for interview
The piloting of all the questions for actual interview with medical tourists will be first carried
out by semi-structured interviews, elaborating in-depth response, in the UK with
approximately 5 British people who have visited Thailand for some kind of medical treatment.
As supported by what Gillham (2007) mention, a proper pilot study is a reproduction of the
main study involving fewer participants who possess the same characteristics as the final
target group.
Exploratory interviews
After the piloting, the first visit to BPH will take place with about 20 patients- 10 from the UK
and 10 from the US - who will be interviewed in a semi-structured format with open-ended
questions, such as ‘what motivated you to travel to Thailand for medical care?’ As suggested
by Gillham (2007), careful semi-structured interviewing before the questionnaire being
constructed can help identify the most of the likely answers. The most frequent keywords of
travel motivations from the medical tourists’ answers will be incorporated into the
questionnaire.
Main questionnaire study
The researcher will inform the hospital during the first study visit of the requirement to survey
150 medical tourists using the quota sampling from two different countries visiting BPH. This
sampling is proposed here because it is aimed as far as possible to include an equal proportion
of participants from two different countries and from both genders (nationality and gender
distribution) in order to address a representative sample. Medical tourists from each
nationality will be approached until quotas are filled, in other words until there are at least 75
medical tourists from each individual nationality.
7 Foreigners resident in Thailand