Applying Flyvbjerg's phronetic social science questions to tourism humour studies

This study has two major goals. It discusses and presents Flyvbjerg’s four value-rational questions for framing the value and direction of any area of tourism study. Secondly, it applies this framework to the topic of humour in tourism. The specific humour studies to be discussed include research on tourists’ humour appreciation across a total of six Australian tourism settings. Analysis revealed that humour has contributed to making tourism experiences more enjoyable, entertaining and engaging. Flyvbjerg’s framework to evaluate the findings of the studies was shown to offer searching challenges to the directions of the specific work and produce a range of recommendations for the broader topic of interest. The wider use of this pivotal social science appraisal of study topics is itself recommended.