With the generous support from the OYCF Teaching Fund, Dr. Yang Yang taught a graduate-level course in the School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, one of the most prestigious research universities in the mainland China, from May 23 to June 3, 2014.

The course, entitled “Quantitative Analysis in Tourism Research”, was designed to be a one-credit graduate class, and a total of 24 students have officially registered this class. It surveyed various multivariate statistical modeling techniques that are widely used in tourism research. The course included both lecture and lab sections. Lectures focused mainly on several important topics, including cross-tab analysis, ANOVA, factor analysis, cluster analysis, regression models and diagnostics, and simple structural equation models. Labs helped the students use statistical packages (such as SPSS and AMOS) to apply the methods covered and analyze tourism data.

Most students demonstrated a well understanding of basic quantitative methods covered in the class and were able to use statistical packages to investigate the data set with these methods. More importantly, students got more familiarized with the general framework of quantitative methodology and were capable of evaluating the appropriateness of methods for their own research projects.