Research Performance of Tourism Education Quality Accredited Programmes in Greater China

The relationship between research and teaching has long been recognised and in recent decades has been the subject of some debate. The issues are relevant to tourism and hospitality education programmes, which have two systems in existence for performance assessment: one is the evaluation of teaching quality; and the other ranks programmes based on their research outputs. Despite the interconnection between teaching and research, the two related evaluation systems have seldom been considered together. Among the hospitality and tourism programmes in the world, those in Greater China (referring to Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) have shown the strongest interest in Tourism Education Quality (TedQual) Accreditation, with 13 programmes accredited by 2017. This study aims to compare the research performances of Chinese programmes with TedQual accreditation by computing the overall and per capita research outputs of the relevant institutions. The comparison of certified programmes leads to a revisitation of the old issue, namely, whether education quality is related to the research performance of the faculty.