Snowballing in 35°C: an inquiry into second-home tourism in Mozambique

Increased mobility has played an important role in promoting and developing tourism as a global phenomenon. One result since the late 1990s has been the development of the well-researched second-home tourism phenomenon in the Global North. Fewer studies on second-home tourism have been carried out in the Global South, especially in the least developed countries (LDCs). The difficulty of collecting reliable data in LDCs is presented as a key contributing factor to the lack of studies. Whereas researchers in, for example, the Nordic countries have access to comprehensive public registries of second homes enabling large-scale data-driven research, studying this phenomenon in data-poor contexts requires appropriate fieldwork methods and strategies. The following research note discusses snowballing and participant observation methods employed in fieldwork on second-home tourism in two small coastal Mozambican towns. It concludes with a brief discussion on the findings and the prospects for future research in historically and socio-economically comparable locations.