TOURISM GEOGRAPHY RESEARCHES IN TURKEY: A CONTENT ANALYSIS FOR GRADUATE THESES

The economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts of tourism are increasing day by day which in parallel increases the interest of geography which examines tourism matters in terms of venues, spatial change, space-human relations with its own principles. The geography discipline makes an important contribution to tourism studies through different theories, methods, techniques and approaches. As with other disciplines, one of the most important academic outcomes of tourism geography is graduate theses. The first thesis on tourism in the world has been made by geographers and especially Anglo-American geographers have pioneering work in this field. Nowadays, the academic contributions of geographers to tourism are continuing in many countries of the world. The main objective of the study is to analyze the current situation of graduate thesis written in the field of tourism geography in Turkey and evaluate these academic theses which are one of the indicators of tourism geography and tourism sub-discipline in terms of subject, qualification, paradigm, literature and method. Therefore 111 graduate theses on tourism prepared by geographers until December 2015 have been determined and 103 of them have been accessed. Graduate theses have been analyzed according to years, universities, page numbers, bibliography cases, data analysis methods and contents according to processed subjects and the data were interpreted according to the findings in the study. An examination of the theses revealed that while pioneering and qualitative studies in tourism geography in Turkey were available, they were few in number and most of them were methodologically and theoretically inadequate in terms of scientific practices