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Our chapter takes readers on a journey through previous published doctoral research which investigates community cultural festivals. Socio-cultural phenomena such as festivals are multifaceted and embrace all walks of life, culture, and ethnic backgrounds. So much so that festivals cannot be separated from a culture or from a community, as they shape, represent, and recreate their histories. It could further be argued that social reality is multiple, divergent, and interrelated, and as a direct result reality becomes the meaning attributed to experience and is not the same for everyone (Cohen & Manion, In D. Remenyi, B. Williams, A. Money, & E. Swartz (Eds.), Doing research in business and management: An introduction to process and method. London: Sage, 1987; Remenyi et al., Doing research in business and management: An introduction to process and method. London: Sage, 1998).From a methodological point of view festivals can pose many challenges to researchers, such as how to capture, record, and analyse the rich qualitative and quantitative data they produce across a variety of time periods and phases of festival planning, production, and consumption. Our research utilised a flexible and reflexive methodological approach which incorporated five data-collection techniques (Fig. 4.1) to capture and analyse primary data across these unique festival phases. In particular the research aimed to reveal the distinct relationships between planning, production, and consumption. Our chapter begins by examining the philosophical underpinning of the doctoral research, such as the integration of Guba and Lincoln's (1985. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). London: Sage) four criterion of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability to raise the trustworthiness within qualitative research. Following this discussion we show how the research questions and data needs are operationalised into practical data-collection methods in the field. The third part of the chapter looks at the integration between literature reviewed, data gathered, and triangulation or in this case quint-angulation of primary data to build themes for analysis which revealed the contribution to knowledge. The fourth and final part of our chapter concludes on the research methodology employed and discusses how this has been taken forward and shaped judgement on our further research on community festivals.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-52386-0_4

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