Title of Paper

Simulation Modeling of Occupational Health of Tourism and Hospitality Workers

Author Information

Sevil Sonmez, University of Central FloridaFollow
Yorghos Apostolopoulos, Texas A&M UniversityFollow
Michael K. Lemke, Texas A & M University - College StationFollow
YuChin (Jerrie) Hsieh, Rochester Institute of TechnologyFollow

Author Bios (50 Words for each Author)

Dr. Sönmez’s research is interdisciplinary, applied, and delves broadly into tourism management and the nexus of leisure, work, and health. Her current work focuses on health-promotive role of vacations; occupational health of tourism/hospitality sector workers; and travel/tourism health risk management. Her work incorporates complexity theory and a systems science approach to deconstruct the complex/dynamic nature of her research questions.

Dr. Apostolopoulos’s research blends social, chronic disease, and occupational epidemiology with public policy and complex systems science. His work delves into how social structures shape excess chronic syndemicity along diverse sociodemographic lines, using statistical, mathematical, and computational modeling and simulation to deconstruct critical transitions of chronic disease, detect early-warning signals to anticipate dramatic population health changes, and identify impactful interventions.

Dr. Lemke’s research is grounded conceptually and theoretically in social ecology, systems thinking, and complex systems science and uses diverse methodological approaches, including multiple qualitative and quantitative techniques, participatory group modeling, and system dynamics and agent/individual-based modeling and simulation. His research focuses on disparities in chronic disease, particularly those related to occupation, with an emphasis on upstream drivers of disease outcomes.

Dr. Hsieh’s research focuses on finding the best ways to improve hospitality employees’ health and wellness, thus increasing operational performance and productivity. For over a decade, her work has been dedicated to studying the work-versus-personal-life balance of hospitality employees and bed & breakfast innkeepers, coping strategies used to maintain such a balance, and hotel housekeepers’ physical and psychological health issues resulting from adverse working conditions.

Abstract (150 Words)

Tourism and hospitality research has utilized mostly traditional approaches to understand and explain observed phenomena. Complexity science offers great potential for studying the complex dynamical system of tourism and hospitality with greater effectiveness. The accelerating pace of technological advances, destabilization of societies, and increasing levels of uncertainty have fueled the emergence of chaos and complexity perspectives. Social scientists are increasingly viewing the conceptual and statistical assumptions underlying the linear paradigm as being seriously flawed and limiting our ability to explain social phenomena. Innovative complex-systems approaches grounded in complex adaptive systems (CAS) theoretical, methodological, and analytical perspectives have potential to lead to greater understanding of various phenomena. The foregoing methods and tools will be discussed in the context of occupational health of Hispanic immigrant hospitality sector workers.