Page 50 - Sustaining Accommodation SMES

5 Research Framework and Objectives

complementary scoping study, ensuring that the listed barriers re-
flected challenges reported by accommodation smes in practice
and those identified in targeted external literature, while remaining
aligned with existing research on sustainability standard adoption.
• Section D. Identified Needs for the Adoption of iso 21401: This sec-
tion was designed to identify forms of external support considered
necessary to facilitate the adoption of iso 21401. Participants were
invited to rate the importance of 15 potential actions using a scale
ranging from 0 (Not at all important) to 6 (Extremely important).
The items included policy-relevant and practice-oriented measures
such as comprehensive staff support by external auditors, credible
evidence demonstrating tangible benefits (e.g., documented cost re-
ductions), and cost caps for auditing processes (not exceeding an
average middle-management wage). Additional measures included
adapting requirements to business size and organisational capacity,
governmental co-funding of monitoring tools, and developing on-
line self-assessment and benchmarking platforms. The selection and
formulation of these items were informed by insights from the qual-
itative interviews and the complementary scoping study, ensuring
that the identified needs reflected both empirically observed con-
straints among accommodation smes and gaps highlighted in the
targeted review of external literature.
The online survey was disseminated across a wide array of accommo-
dation providers throughout the Euro-Med region, with the methodolog-
ical target of securing a minimum of 50 sme responses per consortium
country, in order to achieve significant reach and scalability.

quantitative data analysis and handling
While the preceding sections describe how individual constructs were
measured through the survey instrument, this section explains how
the collected quantitative data were subsequently handled, aggregated,
and analysed. The analytical procedures were designed to reflect the ex-
ploratory and diagnostic nature of the study, as well as the applied objec-
tive of informing sustainability transition processes in the accommoda-
tion sector.
Across all survey sections, the analysis prioritised transparency and in-
terpretability over statistical complexity. Given the ordinal and binary na-
ture of most variables, the analysis relied primarily on descriptive statis-

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