Table 2.

Major themes and codes emerging from the data.

Dimension	Themes	Extracted codes	References
Internal factors	Personal interest	Personal preference; topic preference; personal priority; idiosyncratic; inner-conflict remedy; life motivation; delightful habit; nationality affiliation; empathy; personal aspiration in tourism destination development; personal desire.	I'Anson and Smith (2004); Keshavarz and Shekari (2020); Pemberton (2012); Post et al. (2017); Tedd, 2006
	Religious background	Religious belief as way of life; confidence when combining student religious belief with academic goals	Jeynes (2010); Logan (2013); Oukunlola et al. (2021)
	Career aspirations	Development aspiration for own's country education; better career	I'Anson and Smith (2004); Jensen (2013); Millar (2013)
External factors
	Society improvement	Sustainability awareness in tourism destination; tourist arrival growth; destination economy development; women empowerment; alternative tourism development; job opportunity creation; livelihood improvement; solving environmental problem	Prebor (2010)
	Language and communication concern	Language barrier; common ease of communication due to same nationality	Franklin & Jaeger (2007)
	Supervisor influence	Topic idea from supervisor; supervisor's guidelines, consultation with supervisor; supervisor's suggestions; supervisor's contributions to student's decision making; supervisor's expertise in particulars area	Chu (2015); Lee and Deale (2016); Jensen (2013); Keshavarz and Shekari (2020); Xia (2013); Tuomaala et al. (2014)
	Impactful topics	Desire to find impactful topic	Keshavarz and Shekari (2020)
	Feasibility of research design	The method is appropriate with research gap; the design is suitable for data collection	Keshavarz and Shekari (2020)
	COVID-19 publishable topic	Desire for publishing paper; search for hot topic for publications	Keshavarz and Shekari (2020); McIltrot (2018)
	Online data collection restrictions	Inability to conduct face-to-face interview; international travel ban; impact on research design; impact on methodology; impact on data collection process; deprivation of obtaining in-depth data; prevented to meet respondent; alteration from face-to-face interview into online interview (Zoom & Facebook Messenger); inability to read the respondents' body language; prone to several interruptions during online interview; affected conversation flow; remote interview leads to limited in-depth interview	Alvarado et al. (2021); Hadar et al. (2020)