Compare methods

	Travel Community Netnography	Visitor-Employed Photography
Field	Tourism	Tourism
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	1983
Originator	Robert V. Kozinets	Geoffrey Cherem & B. L. Driver
Type	Adapted ethnographic pipeline for studying online communities	Participant-generated visual data-collection and analysis technique
Seminal source	Kozinets, R. V. (2002). The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 61-72.	Cherem, G. J., & Driver, B. L. (1983). Visitor Employed Photography: A Technique to Measure Common Perceptions of Natural Environments. Journal of Leisure Research, 15(1), 65-83.
Aliases	Online Travel Community Ethnography, Tourism Netnography, Travel Forum Netnographic Analysis, Digital Travel Community Ethnography	VEP, Participant-Generated Photography, Visitor Photo Elicitation, Tourist-Generated Imagery Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Travel community netnography applies netnography, ethnography adapted to the study of online communities, to the forums, social-media groups, blogs and review communities where travellers gather to share experiences, advice and meaning. Developed by Robert Kozinets (2002, 2010), netnography offers a rigorous, ethically grounded set of procedures for entering an online community, immersing in its communications, and interpreting the symbolism, meanings and consumption practices of its members. In tourism it is used to understand how travellers construct destinations, make decisions, perform identity and form attachments through naturally occurring online interaction, observed unobtrusively rather than provoked by an interviewer. Kozinets positioned netnography as faster, less costly and more naturalistic than offline ethnography while demanding the same interpretive depth, reflexivity and ethical care.	Visitor-employed photography (VEP) is a participant-generated visual method in which visitors themselves take photographs of what is meaningful, appealing or notable to them in a setting, and the resulting images, together with the visitors' own explanations, become the research data. Introduced by Cherem and Driver (1983) to measure common perceptions of natural environments, VEP hands the camera to the visitor rather than relying on researcher-chosen images or words alone, capturing place perception through the visitor's own eyes. In tourism it has become a key tool for studying destination image, as MacKay and Couldwell (2004) demonstrated by using VEP to investigate how visitors actually picture a site and how that compares with official promotional imagery. By combining what visitors photograph with why, VEP yields a visitor-centred, relatively unobtrusive window onto how people see and value places.