Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

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Preface
Students of cultural anthropology and archeology may be asked early in
their training to take a stand for qualitative or quantitative research. Readers
of this textbook will find no support for this pernicious distinction. I lay out
my support for positivism in chapter 1, but I also make clear that positivism
is not a synonym for quantitative. As you read chapter 1, think about your
own position. You don’t have to agree with my ideas on epistemological issues
to profit from the later chapters on how to select informants, how to choose a
sample, how to do questionnaire surveys, how to write and manage field notes,
and so on.
Chapter 2 introduces the vocabulary of social research. There’s a lot of jargon,
but it’s the good kind. Important concepts deserve words of their own,
and chapter 2 is full of important concepts like reliability, validity, levels of
measurement, operationism, and covariation.
Whenever I introduce a new term, like positivism, hermeneutics, standard
error of the mean, or whatever, I put it in boldface type. The index
shows every example of every boldfaced word. So, if you aren’t sure what a
factorial design is (while you’re reading about focus groups in chapter 9, on
interviewing), the index will tell you that there are other examples of that
piece of jargon in chapter 5 (on experiments), in chapter 10 (on questionnaires),
and in chapter 18 (on qualitative analysis).
Chapter 3 is about choosing research topics. We always want our research
to be theoretically important, but what does that mean? After you study this
chapter, you should know what theory is and how to tell if your research is
likely to contribute to theory or not. It may seem incongruous to spend a lot
of time talking about theory in a textbook about methods, but it isn’t. Theory
is about answering research questions . . . and so is method. I don’t like the
bogus distinction between method and theory, any more than I like the one
between qualitative and quantitative. Chapter 3 is also one of several places in
the book where I deal with ethics. I don’t have a separate chapter on ethics.
The topic is important in every phase of research, even in the beginning phase
of choosing a problem to study.
Chapter 4 is about searching the literature. Actually, ‘‘scouring’’ is a better
word than ‘‘searching.’’ In the old days, BC (before computers), you could get
away with starting a research paper or a grant proposal with the phrase ‘‘little
is known about . . .’’ and filling in the blank. Now, with online databases, you
simply can’t do that.
Chapter 5 is about research design and the experimental method. You
should come away from chapter 5 with a tendency to see the world as a series
of natural experiments waiting for your evaluation.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are about sampling. Chapter 6 is an introduction to