Interpretative farm walks: A promising research method for exploring the meaning and making of farm tourism enterprises

This working paper reports part of a study of rural entrepreneurship in New Zealand. The focus is on the authors' trial of 'interpretative farm walks' as a novel means of capturing qualitative data relating to the development and operationalisation of tourism enterprises on working family farms. While the walking interview has been adopted and discussed by researchers specialising in health, urban regeneration and the social sciences more generally, the method has not featured in tourism studies. Based on the authors' recent experimentation with the method, they conclude that the 'interpretative walk' is an effective method for navigating and exploring the real world setting within which a tourism venture is situated and operates. One of the great attributes of the method is that it allows for unexpected encounters with the places, spaces and materialities of tourism, behind which lie stories (and data) not so easily unearthed using conventional stationary interview methods.