Abstract
There has been a growing move to include underrepresented and/or underprivileged groups in tourism research. Despite these efforts, some remain excluded, such as disabled children and young people (here onwards, disabled children). Using rights-based discourses and disabled children’s childhood studies as guiding frameworks, this thesis argues that disabled children are legitimate research participants with a right to have a say in matters that affect them. Honouring disabled children’s rights to voice and participate in tourism and tourism research, this study asks, what do disabled children have to say about their holidays?
Following a participatory design, disabled children (aged 5-18 years) living in New Zealand with recent holiday experiences were invited to participate in the study. With family support, seven children with experiences of different disabilities contributed to the study. Qualitative methods were utilised. Where necessary, procedures were tailored innovatively to ensure the research process was accessible to each participant. Doing justice to participants’ shared insights was central to this thesis. Thus, using narrative analysis, individual participants’ accounts were analysed in their entirety before conducting an analysis of narratives to identify common themes. The rigorous study of narratives in their entirety necessitated limiting the thesis to four of the seven participants: Zara, UnicornCat, Juan and Cooper. These participants were selected based on the variability of gender, age, and experience of disability.
The collective narratives from the four participants revealed two overarching themes: holidays are fun and pleasurable, and holidays can be less pleasurable at times. These insights into disabled children’s holiday experiences, including methodological improvisations and relational approaches to ethics, are of value to future research and can inform tourism practitioners, disability advocacy, community organisations, families, and, importantly, disabled children. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to new knowledge by bringing together tourism research with disability studies, childhood studies, disabled children’s childhood studies, and rights discourses that place the voices and experiences of disabled children at the forefront. Each participant’s narrative has been converted into a storybook and shared with the latter, with some identifying it as a priceless memory book.