Dr. Buning is a Senior Lecturer within the tourism discipline in the UQ Business School and the research lead for the UQ Micromobility Research Cluster. His research interests reside at the intersection of physical activity, travel, and events. Within this area, his research agenda is focused on how tourists are physically active as both a driver of tourism behaviour (i.e., active lifestyle sports) and during visitation (i.e., active transport). His research works on active lifestyle sports closely mirrors his passions in active sport tourism for mountain biking, cycling, running, rock climbing, hiking, and more. His work crosses over to active transport through bikeshare, e-scooters, and more generally micromobility where he is focused on tourism usage and related impacts.
The outcome of his work enables communities, events, and organizations to efficiently market to and attract visitors, encourage physical activity generally, and improve the related impact to destinations as a form of sustainable tourism. Prior to academia, Dr. Buning worked in the running event industry managing race logistics and continues to work with physical activity focused organizations, events, and communities as a consultant in developing data driven business strategy.
His research methodology speciality is in mixed methods tailored to the research question using both quantitative methods (i.e., survey research, secondary data) and qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups. ). Often his work is interdisciplinary in collaboration with scholars from geography, urban planning, and transport engineering using a wide range of data sources,
Dr. Buning is regularly featured in the media, serves as an expert to government, and publishes on the topics of active transport, sport tourism, and event management.
Research methods expertise includes:
Survey research design and analysis
Structural equation modelling
Delphi studies
Quantitative scale development
In-depth interviews and focus groups
Grounded theory
Secondary data and meta-analysis
Interested in working on research, teaching, or consulting projects? Please get in touch!
Sara and her research group, the Low Harm Hedonism Initiative, develop theories of environmentally significant human behaviour and leverage them to design practical measures that trigger pro-environmental behaviour without undermining consumer satisfaction. These new behavoiur change interventions are then tested in real-world contexts, so their effectiveness on actual behaviour change with environmental consequences can be established. Sara’s research is driven by scholarly curiosity and the desire to create meaningful change. Sara is a dedicated supervisor and mentor of early career researchers.
Dr Jan Packer has a background in Psychology having completed a BA (Hons) at UQ in 1976. Her PhD (Education, QUT, 2004) focussed on motivations for learning in educational leisure settings. She has published broadly in the area of educational psychology over many years. The current major focus of her research is in applying the principles of educational, environmental and positive psychology to understand and facilitate visitor experiences in leisure settings such as museums and other tourist and leisure contexts. Jan was co-editor of the international journal, Visitor Studies from 2005 through 2011.
