Tourism research has increasingly embraced methodological diversity, yet often separates qualitative and quantitative traditions. Revisiting King, Keohane, and Verba’s Designing Social Inquiry , this research highlights their claim that social science is guided by a unified logic of inference, comprising descriptive and causal inference. While these logics underpin much of tourism scholarship, from mapping destination images to modeling the tourism-growth nexus, the distinctive nature of tourism as lived experience invites a more explicit articulation of how KKV’s unified logic can be applied to tourism’s humanistic domains. Drawing on inferential reasoning, this study proposes a three-tier logic of inference specific to tourism: experiential inference, which captures how tourists live and feel the world; transformative inference, which explains how experiences catalyze personal, communal, and environmental change; and existential inference, which addresses ultimate meanings and being through tourism. To operationalize this perspective, the paper develops an integrated inferential framework that links research questions, measurement strategies, and analytic procedures to these inferential targets. The framework is illustrated through an empirical vignette of dark tourism at Con Dao Island, demonstrating how experiential encounters, processes of transformation, and existential interpretations can be systematically inferred from empirical materials. In addition, the study advances a meaning-oriented analytical orientation that encourages scholars to attend not only to observable outcomes but also to processes of human meaning-making within tourism contexts. Collectively, these contributions provide methodological clarity while acknowledging tourism’s existential dimensions, offering a coherent framework for applying KKV’s inferential standards to tourism’s experience-, change-, and meaning-oriented inquiries.
Tuyen Tran (Mon,) studied this question.