Mapping Epistemological Orientations in Research on Dark Tourism: Qualitative Content Analysis of a Scopus-Based Corpus

In the literature on dark tourism, conceptual diversity has often been addressed as a definitional or thematic problem. This study was conducted to identify the dominant epistemological orientations in a focused corpus of 172 English-language, open access articles indexed in Scopus that explicitly use the term dark tourism. An additional aim was to describe the temporal and methodological distributions of these articles. The articles were analysed using qualitative content analysis on a systematically constructed corpus. They were coded in terms of representational/heritage-centred, functional/social practice, motivational/audience-typology, experiential/affective, and activity-based/performative visitor orientations. Thirty-five randomly selected articles were re-coded by a second researcher, who was blind to the initial coding decisions. The percentage agreement for the dominant orientation was 71.4%, with Cohen’s κ = 0.641, and the percentage agreement for method classification was 94.3%, with κ = 0.888. In the post-consensus distribution, the representation/heritage orientation was the largest category, with 54 articles. Motivation, experience, and performative visitor orientations together constituted 52.3% of the corpus. These findings do not indicate a linear paradigm shift but rather a descriptive pattern in which different forms of knowledge production coexist within the corpus examined. This study extends beyond thematic classification by providing evidence for and explaining how dark tourism is constructed as an object of inquiry. The results should be interpreted only with respect to the defined Scopus-based open access corpus.